Misunderstanding poverty leads to bad housing policy

The conclusions drawn from a recent study of the Housing Voucher Choice program in Orleans Parish demonstrate that if you don’t understand why the world works as it does, not only can you not craft good policy, but also liberty becomes threatened.

The New Orleans Data Center published a report about the federal benefit more commonly known as “Section 8” housing. The program calculates a standard payment value representing what a local housing authority would define as a “moderately” priced home and offers eligible clients a chit worth that rate minus 30 percent of the family’s monthly adjusted income or gross rent minus monthly adjusted income. Landlords whose dwellings meet health and safety standards may rent to voucher holders, who can supplement the payment standards with any amount of their own money up to 40 percent of monthly adjusted income. As a result, landlords get a guaranteed income stream (for a minimum of a year at first) with a security deposit, and low-income renters get a break on housing with the money they save potentially going to better their positions in life. In New Orleans, the Housing Authority of New Orleans, for example, set the fiscal year 2015 standard payment for a two-bedroom home at $1,028.

The study in question looked at whether the vast expansion in Orleans Parish of voucher supply and usage after the hurricane disasters of 2005, when the public housing stock shrank over 90 percent, had the effect of diluting concentrations of poverty and, as race is associated with poverty, of racial segregation in housing patterns. It concluded that both had happened, but so moderately that program implementation had only had a marginal impact.

Bluff called, not time to retreat on LA film subsidies

Understand that the retreat of special interests wishing to siphon more tax dollars from citizens to make movies is not because of their generous and cooperative nature, but because the correlation of political forces continues to swing even more decisively against them.

After making a big show of threatened lawsuits against the state for changes to its Motion Picture Investors tax credit, last week the group representing filmmakers and ancillary entities announced they had dropped that strategy. The changes put a cap on how much in credits would be redeemable each year for the next three, and included other tightening of criteria to receive them that would diminish their availability and generally favor in-state efforts. The group asserted that suing essentially would make the film environment in state look unfavorable, which it wished not to encourage.

Yeah, right. It’s not the legal climate that has changed; as previously explained, the shills had a weak case from the start challenging the constitutionality of the new law, a threat which properly understood constituted a bluff. With this strategic alteration signaled, this proclamation and explanation serve as another bluff to try to magnify the power of an increasingly weak hand. The very fact that the group had to publicize the demise of a nonexistent suit shows an attempt to leverage power by trying to create the impression that it is discarding that plan in exchange for policy-maker compliance in changing the law essentially before the cap bites, in a way more favorable to the interests it represents. In others words, it’s trying hard to convince the political class that it’s the one with leverage and can call the tune.

LA must discourage "sanctuary" to help public safety

Under the radar until a horrific event, Sen. David Vitter’s largely lonely crusade to compel cities to put public safety before ideology now may play a visible role in the campaign for Louisiana governor this year.

Recently, a woman in San Francisco was killed seemingly randomly allegedly by an illegal alien with a long rap sheet of violent crime, deported five times. But he had been under city detention fewer than three months previously – except that San Francisco, as part of the “sanctuary movement,” long ago began to refuse to forward information about illegal immigrants it detains to the federal government, even though legally local law enforcement agencies must do so. Following the law enables the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to take custody of and deport them.

It’s no accident that “sanctuary cities,” or those like San Francisco with an official policy of law enforcement not asking about citizenship status, are larger cities with higher proportions of immigrants that have higher crime rates. Given that population studies of the nation’s jails show these contain disproportionately more non-citizens than their incidence in the general population, and that a sample of diverse local jurisdictions reveals the proportion of illegal aliens jailed is much higher than their estimated population proportion, it’s likely that sanctuary cities (which would not keep citizenship statistics) have even higher and more disproportionate numbers of illegal aliens imprisoned. While the valid data about this are uncoordinated, overall they point to increased numbers of illegal aliens elevate criminal activity.

Uncertainty should make ganja law go up in smoke

So Louisiana finally took the plunge this regular session and went for making dispensing of medical marijuana in the state a future reality. Except that, as things turned out, regardless of the law it may be impossible to do it with no good reason to do it anyway.

While the state actually has had on the books the concept of legal medical marijuana for almost a quarter of a century, until this year a legal mechanism to distribute it was missing. That changed with the enacting of Act 261, which lays out details for the growing of it, the process to prescribe it, and how to dispense it, with three different agencies to issue appropriate regulations to fill in the blanks.

Unfortunately, this rendition seems to have created more questions and ambiguity than it was intended to resolve. The law gives first dibs on production to Louisiana State University or Southern University, and that the LSU Agricultural Center seems willing to undertake this at one of its 19 locations in the state. But this looks only to cover the cultivation of it, not the processing into one common medicinal use forms, oil (the law prohibits the form of rolled leaves designed for smoking or any other raw or crude variant such as in flakes).

CSA symbols, used rightly, promote understanding

Like herpes, the manufactured conflict of the display of the (Third) Confederate (Battle) Flag keeps coming back, but in the latest outbreak including the passengers of Confederate memorials of any kind. Ironically, reactions to a repressive regime of the past invite a different kind of repression.

The latest controversy, kicked off by a tragic mass murder in a South Carolina church, quickly descended into nonsense when that led to intensified cries to banish the flag from polite society. Never mind that the alleged killer didn’t burst into the house of worship and proceed to impale people with poles with that flag hanging from them; the only connection the flag had to the incident was he was pictured with one and he appears to be a white supremacist (having tried and discarded other extreme views). In particular, complainers wanted these flags removed from government property.

As this space has noted previously, flying this flag as a singular symbol adds nothing to the public weal. While it can represent admirable qualities of a society over which it flew, the fact is it also was the banner of a breakaway enterprise set against many other admirable qualities of American society and, as its leaders admitted, primarily because they wanted to continue slavery. So it if one wants to celebrate certain values, why not choose to fly the American flag, which has the presumed same positive aspects as any version of the Confederate flag, minus the baggage of condoning slavery?

Sociopathic left ramping up its hatred of Jindal

It’s a reflection of the impoverishment of liberalism that explains why Gov. Bobby Jindal rankles so much its faithful, if somewhat less balanced, followers.

Last week, the Jindal campaign asked Twitter enrollees to send in questions to him that he could address at a campaign appearance. A few sent were useful and a few others provocative, but serious in intent in both cases. Yet many were unserious and hateful, which begs the question of why a relatively low-polling Republican candidate for president would trigger such emotional, thoughtless responses.

It’s because, as this space pointed out long ago when it became clear Jindal would win the 2007 governor’s contest, that Jindal articulates well conservative themes and he is from an ethnic minority group. Worse for those of the immature bent, since then increasingly he has addressed issues that unmistakably reflect his evangelical Catholicism.

Right idea, but missed surer things to stop tax hikes

The good news is somebody made to obvious move to sue the Louisiana Legislature for ignoring the Constitution regarding the passage of legislation. The bad news is they picked the wrong item to contest that more than likely will end in their defeat, and with that brings up the question why try the half-court shot when an available slam dunk wins the game?

Yesterday, perhaps the most important specific business lobby in the state, the Louisiana Chemical Association, filed suit against the Legislature and other state entities for having put into effect HCR 8, which lopped off a quarter of the exempted tax for utilities that businesses otherwise would pay. The aggregate one percent is expected to raise just over $100 million this fiscal year. It based this mainly on the fact that to repeal a tax exemption requires a two-thirds vote in each chamber, which did not happen in the House of Representatives.

But just as the Constitution helps them with the supermajority requirement in Art. VII Sec. 2, it strikes a critical blow against it in Art. III Sec. 20, which states that laws may be suspended by the same voting requirement with which they were enacted. A suspension differs from a repeal in that it only is temporary, lasting no more than 60 days past the end of the legislative regular session after enacted, and does not require gubernatorial action. By contrast, a repeal is permanent or lasts for a period greater than a year.

LA pioneering religious freedom after marriage ruling

When the U.S. Supreme Court recently created a new protected class, people who identify themselves as homosexuals, it opened a whole can of worms regarding questions of freedom of religious exercise, and Louisiana appears to have become ground zero for sorting it all out.

Specifically, the issue right away became whether individuals who are asked in behave in a way that would cause them to deny their religious beliefs, by having them by way of cooperation to assist in the commission of what they see as facilitating immoral acts, must provide that service. The questions arose both in the performance of public sector duties and in those non-government persons and entities participating in commerce.

Regarding government employees, the issue arose when Gov. Bobby Jindal’s office issued a memorandum that stated that clerks of court and state employees who process marriage license requests from people of the same sex wishing to marry may refuse to do so. The legal brief essentially restated federal law (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act), which requires an agency to accommodate employees' exercise of their religion unless such accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the conduct of the agency’s operations. Practically speaking, this means that employees who object to handing out such licenses may defer if other employees can be found to do the same; if not, then the objecting employee(s) likely would be forced to do so because that would cause undue hardship on operations. The severity of hardship is judged by whether it would cause an actual cost to the agency or to other employees or be an actual disruption of work.

Delay good to increase awareness of ruling's danger

So people of the same sex who wish to marry each other may have to wait a bit to obtain marriage licenses in Louisiana. Politics may explain the delay, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do.

Only Mississippi seems to follow Louisiana in waiting on allowing issuance of these, where the state’s Constitution prohibits state recognition of such unions but last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that used creative license to give birth to a new protected class defined only by its behavior will override that passage. The Court recognizes a 25 day period for reconsideration although that is extraordinarily unlikely to happen. As a result, almost all states have started to issue such licenses, including 12 of the 14 that either did not have the ability in their Constitution, by law, or by judicial fiat.

But Louisiana and Mississippi lay under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously had heard a district court case that had denied the federal government the power to impose a definition of marriage on states. The Supreme Court heard cases consolidated from another circuit. That means that the Fifth Circuit must remand the case it ruled on back to the district court to revisit its decision in light of the discovery of the new protected class and its rights granted by the highest court, but until then its interpretation stands, reaffirmed by Gov. Bobby Jindal. Already such a petition to review had been filed. Atty. Gen. Buddy Caldwell did not mention this action in his statement about why he will not direct license issuance to clerks.

Tools to tame Court within reach of GOP, Jindal

Perhaps echoing sentiments he has harbored from his youthful enthusiasm for former Pres. Ronald Reagan, Gov. Bobby Jindal has transferred a desire to abolish the federal Department of Education to getting rid of the U.S. Supreme Court. Actually, he doesn’t have to go that far to rein in a court straying from the Constitution on issues of the day, and if he does win the presidency, with help from his party he would be in excellent position to do so.

Jindal expressed this desire after two monumentally flawed, discouraging, and dangerous decisions, one to ignore the strict wording of a law in favor of an interpretation the opposite of it infused into it by the Court, and the other to conjure up a new protected class of individuals on the basis of their behavior not otherwise explicitly listed in the Constitution. Both set bad precedents that empowered government while simultaneously threatening liberty through dispensing with democratic norms.

But while Jindal’s frustration may be understandable, the Constitution does not really provide for that solution, unless he wishes to go through the difficult amendment process. Theoretically, this complete neutering of the Court could happen statutorily by the powers vested in Congress in Art. III that, while the article requires the presence of one Supreme Court, it could set the Court’s membership currently at nine to zero. However, it need not take such a drastic approach, for Art. III also allows Congress to set the appellate jurisdiction of the Court beyond that specified in the Constitution – and once before it has done that as a reaction to a Court taking up an inflammatory case.