Disingenuous reply tries to obscure poor pension health

Power and privilege fought back when a particularly dismal report shed more light on Louisiana’s overgenerous, underperforming pension systems, illustrating the attitudes behind why the state faces this looming crisis.

The Pew Center on the States, not known for its hyperbole but rather for its quality in research, noted the poor fiscal health of Louisiana’s pensions systems was close to the bottom of the states. With a recommendation that a pension system be 80 percent funded, at 57 percent the state is now about $19 billion short of that mark. The same information was used by supporters of system reform to argue for changes that would have employees pay their fair share for the generosity of their benefits as at this underfunded level taxpayers are pitching in an extra nearly $1 billion a year to offset.

However, this fix was opposed bitterly by the retirement systems and their interest group allies, resulting in deferral of the legislation and kicking the can down the road some more. Reform would reduce the amount of money coming into the fund and with the generous payouts; never forget that agencies and bureaucrats always prefer more resources than fewer both to get and give because more brings more power. Reform also directs unwanted attention to the systems’ subpar investment performances. These two reasons explain why the unfunded accrued liability has doubled in the past dozen years.

Geymann post, perk passing produces poppycock, piffle

So state Rep. Brett Geymann is quitting his Natural Resources and Environment Committee post and giving up his rent-subsidized apartment across the street from the Capitol? Yawn, and to be expected from someone who on his signature issue has been much more a show horse than a workhorse.

Breathlessly reported in the media, in letting the wider world that no doubt hungered for news about him know about his dramatic life change, Geymann sounded like he had just been disgorged from an est seminar: “I need to separate myself from any perks just to be clear I’ve got one thing in my focus and that’s working on the budget.” And thus he spake, making himself into a modern-day, male, budget-worshipping Julian of Norwich. One might have been excused for expecting a following announcement that he would dress going forward in camel’s hair and eat locusts and wild honey in the desert, the better to lead the way into the New Fiscal Kingdom.

Evicting himself from Pentagon Barracks doesn’t mean he must wander the desert preaching, but it has a little significance. The complex has room for only about a third of all legislators with a tolerance for roommates, so seniority plays a role in grabbing a bed and there’s always a waiting list to get in. Or maybe the saturnalias that rumor has that still break out there from time to time despite ethics reform simply may be too distracting for his purity of fiscal thought.

Legislators evade responsibility, speak hypocritically

A pair of Central Louisiana legislators shows us the only thing worse than blaming someone else for the consequences of your own actions is then to criticize them in doing whatever they did something you’ve done yourself.

You didn’t hear the likes of state Reps. Chris Hazel or Herbert Dixon moan when the “preamble adjustment” that the Legislature passed – with both of their approvals – was used to give a budgetary haircut to the Departments of the Treasury and Culture, Recreation, and Tourism. The passage instructed the Commissioner of Administration to excise, from any part of the budget, $15 million.

But they sure got into high dudgeon when it was used against spending in their districts in order to comply with the adjustment. The Democrat Dixon saw about 200 government jobs eliminated at health care facilities while the Republican Hazel will see the J. Levy Dabadie prison shuttered that will cost those personnel their jobs, although the roughly 100 would be offered positions at nearby state prisons, courtesy of line item vetoes cast by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Recall credibility gap invites accountability requests

Echoing a theme inherent to the Angry Left, backers of recalls of Gov. Bobby Jindal and three other legislators claim these elected officials as part of a grand conspiracy of corporate and ideological interests yet themselves attempt to keep secret their own operation to the point that it strains any credibility.

The “Recall Bobby Jindal” organization actually encompasses efforts against all four, but the stringent recall requirements of the state – needing a third of all registered voters in a political subdivision, district, or state to petition just to have an election except in the smallest – have forced the group to concentrate its fire on just one of the targets, state Rep. Chuck Kleckley, conveniently not only in the area of the main organizers of the group, but also House Speaker. Keep in mind that not only no legislator or statewide official ever has been recalled, there’s never even been an election triggered to do so.

But with only 28,693 registered voters as of Apr., 2012 in Kleckley’s District 36, the threshold of 9,565 reached to produce an election is the real intent of the group. It knows Kleckley has not even had opposition the last two times he has run and that nothing about can change the outcome giving them cause to be after Kleckley’s hide, passing reforms that will improve education but threaten the group’s special interest allies. The point is a historic first time to inconvenience Kleckley, relying on a strategy used time immemorial by bullies, thereby using intimidation, courtesy of the bother of a recall election would cause even with him certain to win, to scare off in the future those that attack the power and privilege of its allied interests.

Zestful Jindal takes advantage of compliant legislators

In reaction to some choice line-item vetoes, no doubt detractors of Gov. Bobby Jindal will voice the usual canards about how the governor’s position in general is too powerful and specifically especially how Jindal is mean and vindictive. But if they wish to place accuracy over emotion and ideology, they’ll come to understand that the real culprits in setting up the exercise of gubernatorial political power don’t include but rather majorities in each chamber of the Legislature.

HB 1 featured ten vetoed line items, although almost all of them dealing with amendments that restricted the scope of executive branch discretion, showed favoritism to certain health care providers, or with funding legislation already vetoed. But it was items dealing with spending by the Departments of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism and Treasury that caught attention.

Out of the former, $2 million for marketing in the Office of Tourism got hacked away. For months, the official serving as the secretary of the department Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, has moaned about how the budget directed him to use part of his dedicated funding stream, from a .03 percent sales tax levy (classified as going to the Tourism Promotion District), to fund big sporting and cultural events – a reasonable use as these events attract tourists. From the latter, whose head Treasurer John Kennedy carps consistently, with ideas from the attention-grabbing while highly impractical to the competent, about how cuts can be made in government but Jindal and legislators won’t do it, got whacked around $511,000 said to be a “retirement adjustment” (meaning making up for unfunded accrued liabilities) excised because, the veto message said, the amount was overestimated from the three-year average and was inflated because it was funding four vacant positions.

Signing one, vetoing other rebate bill aids public education

Those legislators with an interest in maximizing government control grumbled somewhat when state Rep. Kirk Talbot’s HB 969 got put into law, which would allow tax rebates for donations to organizations that would help pay for tuition of lower-income students to private schools. Some responded by getting behind HB 1106 by state Rep. Katrina Jackson, which would allow tax rebates for donations to all but the most successful public schools. Their discontent reached new heights when Gov. Bobby Jindal, in contrast to Talbot’s bill, vetoed Jackson’s – as it is, for very good reasons beyond what he stated.

That perturbed the bill’s author, among others, who declared, with a flair for the inaccurate and sanctimonious, that this had been the only bill out there “which truly helps our public schools to receive much needed resources.” Jindal’s veto message noted that the initial $10 million that the program could cost was unfunded (and by the bill could have created an unfunded mandate by escalating every year). That practical objection aside, there was a huge conceptual objection to it as well, related to the differences between the monopoly and market natures of the different approaches to providing education to the state’s children.

Talbot’s bill provides incentives to donate money to independent organizations although affiliated with private schools that could use the money only as direct awards to families for their children to attend those schools, with preference if demand exceeds supply given to those who would otherwise have attended an underperforming public school. Accountability measures put in place in the new law, which will be supplemented by departmental rules, minimize opportunities to subvert the system on the basis of favoritism to families for reasons of friendship, athletic ability, etc. (but does allow earmarking on the basis of disability). The schools do not get the money directly, which is capped at only 80 or 90 percent of the aid given to public schools for each child, and are not shielded in any way from market forces; you can have all the money in the world flowing into the organization but if families are turned off in having their children attend the associated school, it doesn’t get these funds (and donors who do not have their dollars used can request a refund minus the five percent allowed overhead charge), and donations would decrease to these organizations until the schools improved.

Enforced parsimony improves program menu, delivery

For all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurs relative to budget cuts in Louisiana, the fact of the matter is they have a cleansing effect, wringing out impure inefficiencies otherwise potentially tolerated without the imperative of tighter money. Case studies show the benefits they bring to taxpayers.

In the waning days of the just-completed legislative session, one high-profile program that seemed on the chopping block when there was a movement afoot to exclude some recurring funds from the budget just because they weren’t classified as being in the general fund was Early Steps, which seeks to assist developmentally disabled children to overcome as much as possible learning impediments at an early age to prepare them for regular schooling. If the program does what it should, this makes sense to avoid having more intensive and expensive services later administered without this intervention.

When funding did come through, obviously program participants were relieved, but the near-miss also induced some retrospection about what the program does and how it goes about doing it. As one functionary noted, restructuring and review of the core assumptions of how the program can operate to achieve its goals using fewer resources are tasks inspired by the threat of budgetary reductions. Without such external stimuli, incentives for this kind of evaluation may never exist sufficiently to prompt money-saving measures.

Jindal thwarts lemming's political ploy at taxpayer expense

If lemmings could understand human language, as you watched them run towards the cliff you could run with them, trying to reason with them, telling them if they would just stop and look at the evidence and think about it, they’d hightail it in the opposite direction. But because they are lemmings, because they feel they should be making that dash regardless of the truth that awaits, they wouldn’t stop. Which is why if she could choose to be an animal, state Sen. Karen Peterson would feel right at home as a lemming.

Peterson, a staunch ally of Pres. Barack Obama, recently took command of Louisiana’s Democrats in a state where the embattled Obama remains extraordinarily unpopular and the party unusually inert. She pledged to take the party even further to the political left, its steady drift in that direction already having weakened it, mimicking the actions of Obama at the national level.

As a legislator, this session she signed on to the usual moonbattery as is her wont, but one of her sanitized obnoxious ideas actually made it all the way to the governor’s desk. Her HB 577 came in as a related measure to her HB 568, which was based upon the sham that structural imperfections in society and economics discriminate institutionally against women by forcing them to be paid less than men for comparable work, limited in this bill to government positions. Through careful, valid research this myth long ago and repeatedly has been disproven.

This space helping to endanger LA newspaper industry

In the past few months, plenty of turmoil has swept through the newspaper industry both in northwest Louisiana and the state as a whole. You may thank this column in part for that.

Earlier in the year, Gannett Corporation, the owner of the Shreveport Times and several others newspapers in Louisiana, notified the world that by the end of the year its websites would be converted to paid models of delivery as a response to the rapidly declining revenues from its print versions. The idea is that too much of the product was going out for free and therefore to monetize it beyond the small contributions of digital ad sales.

But this tactic only will slow the decline, because you can’t compete against others still giving away essentially the same content for free. In the good old days, in almost any area of interest, the only source of information or entertainment one could get in a portable, on-demand way was a newspaper. However, you had to pay for it.

How to try retirement reform again to avoid coming crisis

Hopefully, it won’t take a massive crisis to get Louisiana policy-makers to realize the necessity of pension reform – but wait much longer and that imperative will force itself onto the state.

California exemplifies what happens when policy-makers ignore a pending crisis of this nature. The state and many of its political subdivisions in flush times became extremely generous to government employees with the people’s resources, creating a compensation structure that made these employees significantly better off on this account than those in the private sector paying for it. But good times don’t last forever, especially when decades of imprudent state fiscal management combine with periods of the same (such as currently) from the federal government, and now local governments are turning the spigot to ease the flow to public employees as pressure builds on California’s state government to do the same.

Louisiana isn’t yet to that point, but the situation parallels California’s and today’s present in the Bayou State reminds of the Golden State not long ago. Similarly, Louisiana’s employees are overcompensated relative to the private sector for jobs doing similar tasks. Similarly, a huge liability grows as a result that threatens to consume a large portion of future state budgets – with certainty if nothing changes as the Constitution mandates expenditures to reduce the unfunded accrued liability to zero by 2029. And the crisis might come sooner, with a predicted draining of funds to pay liabilities by 2020.