If done right, tobacco tax hike appropriate in Jindal plan

A year-plus and change in circumstances can make quite a difference, as Gov. Bobby Jindal appears to admit with his seeming willingness to raise taxes on tobacco. But although it’s a different situation, the basic principles that legitimize this kind of tax remain the same that he should navigate in adopting this policy.



In 2011, Jindal refused to allow any kind of hike like this or otherwise, saying it constituted a tax increase, even if dedicated to salutary purposes. He vetoed the bill that did make it through the Legislature, only to have legislators reshape it as part of a constitutional amendment, bypassing him, and successfully got the electorate (unwisely, because it junked up the Constitution with a petty revenue-raising measure and was tacked onto another unrelated measure) to amend it in.



This year, the Jindal Administration has signaled that it is willing to accept a substantial increase in this tax as part of an overall strategy to eliminate income taxes in favor of consumption taxes. While the unthinking or partisan might call this inconsistent, it is entirely consistent with the Administration’s stated objective that it will not raise taxes and that shifting the composition of the tax burden does not violate this pledge so long as the overall tax burden is forecast to be no higher.

Wasteful credit retention sabotages Jindal tax swap plan

Already the political left has the garrote out to strangle in the cradle Gov. Bobby Jindal’s audacious tax reform that eliminates income taxes in favor of sales taxes. For this to survive to maturity, those interested in the societal benefits of increased economic development must not hand the revanchists the instrument of its death.

Liberals, whose view of utopia as far as economics goes concentrates more on its use as an instrument of government power and to transfer wealth from its earners to favored constituencies than as a tool to increase wealth in the aggregate, loathe Jindal’s notion to make Louisiana state income taxation disappear. That compounds with the intent of sales taxes to make up the gap to create a revenue neutral plan, leading to indignant cries that the poorer could pay more in total taxes under this structure.


While such claims, as recently noted, are much overblown, the fact is, among the poorer who pay no net state income tax, even as a large portion will be no worse off than before, some of them will getting a smaller kickback in the form of a kind of rebate for the state Earned Income Tax Credit and still others actually will end up paying more in taxes than receive any corresponding governmental benefits. Simply put, however you define the relatively poor (one such leftist interest group studying the impact of the changes pegged those who made $12,000 or less in this category), given the very general outline of the plan heretofore discussed, in aggregate they will pay more.

Overwrought objection misunderstands benefits of change

Today the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will consider a package of changes designed to reduce state mandates on local districts. Applauded by the school districts themselves in general content, only one of these seems to have generated any controversy.

Among ideas such as allowing schools to set their own calendars subject to minimum instruction requirements, allowing for demonstration of proficiency in some areas without duplication of inefficient replication, and in addressing intricacies to judge more validly sustained superior performance, is dropping the requirement that high schools must have one counselor for every 450 students. The professional/interest group representing state counselors, the Louisiana School Counselors Association, lamented the idea, saying the job they do is vital and handing duties to those not credentialed as counselors or eliminating them could have a negative impact on the schools.

But note that this is not what is being proposed. The rule change simply says the state will not force districts to follow this ratio and says nothing at all about how counselors should or should not be hired and/or their duties dispersed to others not so credentialed. And also note that, in that by having that rule, there is an implicit statement that without it districts inevitably would act in a way detrimental to education according to the ethos of the rule, i.e. you have to have at least one counselor per 450 students in order to provide adequate education delivery, because of some other kind of inordinate pressure (presumably, financial) making districts do what they shouldn’t.

School reform critics display lazy, hypocritical arguments

As the Louisiana education train rumbles on, disturbing the ideological prejudices of the political left and disrupting traditional power bases, in their desperation opponents sometimes don their tinfoil hats and claim black helicopter sightings through their faith that somehow some kind of untoward influence is manifesting as a result of the world becoming something they didn’t make. Recognize that such claims simultaneously demonstrate maximal fatuousness as well as stunning moral myopia that leads to selective and unsubstantiated outrage.

For example, recently a group called StudentsFirst hailed Louisiana’s education policies as the most pro-student in the country. The group ranks highest policies that establish education choice provision and decentralized solutions for it.

Naturally, this sent the sentinels of the one-size-fits-all, government monopoly model of education provision into fits, and one complaint attempted to be used to discredit the laurels was that the group donated money to candidates running for the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Hence, the constipated argument goes, the group goads candidates into supporting their position, and then rewards those elected by lauding them.

Jindal tax swap succeeds in fairness, wealth creation

During his second, which ended as his first successful, gubernatorial campaign, Gov. Bobby Jindal said he wanted to cut individual income taxes across the board, if not eliminate them entirely eventually. According to Jindal, that day now has arrived with his announcement of a plan involving the elimination of individual and corporate income taxation that, even with self-imposed imperfections to it as a legacy of Louisiana’s populist plague, creates a fairer and more beneficial tax system for all.

Jindal’s states that simplification of the system will produce more efficiency that will encourage investment from outside the state and more economic development within it by removing these taxes and all the exceptions to them that are disincentives to investing in productive activities. It doesn’t get any simpler than wiping out the state’s progressive income taxes and the 128 exemptions to them which (2011 statistics) comprise more than half of all revenues not collected. Or, another way of thinking about this is that already about half of all income tax revenues are forgone through exemptions; why not just go all the way and let go of the other half?

But Jindal is not counting on the additional economic growth alone to offset loss of state revenues. He also maintains there will be an increase of sales taxes, in a range suggested between 1.6 to 3 percent additional to the state’s combined 4 percent rate. That basic rate is unremarkable – it ranks 38^th among the states – but when the local rate gets thrown in, which has the highest weighted average of all the states at 4.85 percent – this makes the current overall aggregate rate the country’s third-highest and it easily would become the highest with the predicted addition.

Sleepy elections bill to gin up big newspaper opposition

Every once-in-awhile what is considered the omnibus elections bill presented each regular session to the Louisiana Legislature contains something significant to the way in which elections are conducted in the state. Most years it only makes technical and procedural changes that significantly alters things little. But this time out, one of these minor changes may have big ramifications to an important special interest that has nothing to do with elections.

Tucked away in this year’s version, which comes as a product of the State Board of Election Supervisors, among the roughly three dozen measures expected to be written into bill form and introduced is one that would drop the requirement that the names of inactive voters – those who have registration addresses not able to be verified by registrars of voters during the annual canvass or whose correspondence sent to the address on file was returned undeliverable – be published 90 days prior to federal primary elections. The purpose of this is every two years for the state to alert these voters that they would have to go through additional hurdles in order to vote unless they provide address verification.

Instead, the state argues that the online listing, where a voter may enter their names to see whether they have been put on inactive status which is never more than a day old, should suffice. It also would save, according to the last available statistics, for all parishes $200,000 in off-election years and $375,000 in presidential election years.

Dentistry argument misses point about personal responsibility

An intramural argument has broken out between the dentistry profession and those seeking expanded dental preventive care for children of poorer families. But unless a larger question is resolved first, regardless of which side gains the upper policy hand taxpayers will be the loser.

In the wild, wide world of Medicaid coverage, dentistry is an outlier with federal law and regulation essentially making its provision optional. Louisiana provides some emergency care, although it recently had to drop regular care for expectant mothers due to budget concerns. But what many don’t realize is dental care is available to these children in one area, right at their schools, where some perform sealant procedures on teeth, designed to reduce the incidence of cavities that may prevent future access of Medicaid emergency-based services.

In fact, as of the latest statistics available, Louisiana is rife with such clinics, which were encouraged to be established by the state by legislation in 1991 and now have 64, which ranks ninth highest in number but sixth-most per capita. Should a school establish one, they are not cheap; the state Department of Health and Hospitals requires a minimum of six different kinds of professionals mandating six broad areas of performance.

Cassidy, Fleming look best options ready to beat Landrieu

While Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu already has challenged Republican opponents to “bring it on” and made moves to bolster her 2014 reelection campaign, those in the GOP have started the process of differentiating and sorting themselves out to determine who best may bring it on to her ultimate displeasure.

As recently noted, recently involuntarily retired after a single term former Rep. Jeff Landry might want to make his absence in Washington, DC a short hiatus by taking Landrieu’s spot, but that he faces a number of headwinds, chiefly an excitable recently-concluded campaign against Rep. Charles Boustany that may have alienated part of the party and particularly influential members, and depleted many of his available resources. The two were thrown together in the same district as a result of decennial reapportionment that cost Louisiana a seat in the House of Representatives.

Part of Landry’s appeal has been his consistently conservative record, particularly on fiscal matters, but another member of the state’s delegation who could match him call for call on no tax hikes and restrained spending is Rep. John Fleming. Their lifetime American Conservative Union voting records (Landry’s as of this writing just a year as they have been compiled only through 2011) are almost identically perfectly conservative. And Fleming probably could bring more resources to bear for such an expensive campaign (Landrieu spent over $10 million in the 2007-08 period to win reelection) having himself accumulated a half million to start and, like Landry, a successful businessman who can self-finance to some degree a campaign of this magnitude.

Legislature must tweak, fund more ethics enforcement

Loathe as the Louisiana Legislature might be to get into the nuts and bolts of adjudicating ethics matters of elected and appointed officials, it looks as if it will need to do so again as kinks continue to crop up from the massive reform of ethics laws and in their adjudication from the 2008-09 period.

Back then, after incoming Gov. Bobby Jindal made it one of the centerpieces of his successful campaign, in a special session he called this finally got the Legislature to pass much more stringent standards in acceptable practices and disclosure. Subsequently, other changes got made to make more professional the adjudicatory aspect, depoliticizing it and focusing the Louisiana Board of Ethics on the prosecutorial aspect. Previously, the Board had been all of judge, jury, and executioner, which gave inordinate power the small coterie of staff members and allowed politics to creep into judgments with the political appointees of the Board determining whether to follow staff recommendations on prosecution, guilt or innocence, and in punishment.

In fact, the majority of power was concentrated in the hands of the ethics administrator, then long-time employee Gray Sexton. However, the year before the sweeping changes occurred, a law was enacted that prohibited the administrator from essentially operating his own private practice on the side and mandating financial disclosure of the administrator. Rather than follow these guidelines, he quit, saying this change constituted some kind of vendetta against him by disgruntled politicians whom had faced the Board, and then gathered further negative publicity when he and the Board tried to get around the new law with a contractual arrangement for his services that got scuttled.

Concept vehicle's benefits to LA more wishful than likely

The good news is, state taxpayers won’t be on the hook for much on this one. The bad news is, whether it will come to anything is very much an open question and if it doesn’t Caddo Parish taxpayers may be out a sizable chunk of change.

The Elio Motors hybrid car/motorcycle is coming to the shuttered former General Motors plant in southwest Shreveport. The three-wheeled vehicle is like an enclosed motorcycle, two seats one right behind the other with basic operating conveniences. It looks odd, but its founder and its private sector venture capitalist, the latter actually providing the majority of resources to purchase the old facility and also opening up the building to other tenants, hope it will succeed on gas mileage figures at least a third higher than any other current automobile and a price half of any of them.

The state’s contribution comes from incentive and tax abatement programs that may or may not actually return more money to the state than is forgone, but at least won’t be triggered until there is actual production and targets to be reached. Caddo Parish’s is in the form of backing $1 million of $10 million worth of industrial development bonds, with the potential to lose it all if the enterprise goes belly-up and saddled with owning an idle property.