Prudence requires rejecting LA spending cap hike

Conservatives in the Louisiana Legislature can’t flinch at the chance to keep state spending at a more sensible level.

The Wuhan coronavirus pandemic bonus tax revenues for states, from record increases in federal borrowing sustained by Washington Democrats that force-fed an expanded money supply through the economy, has made state coffers flush last year, this year, and likely the next before it fades away – although this action also eroded the value of those dollars by triggering record price inflation that hardly has moderated. This has produced for last year, this year, and forecast for next year extra dollars to the tune of two and a quarter billion for Louisiana.

Naturally, politicians have plans for that. Around a third has to go to nonrecurring spending that includes mandatory paying off unfunded pensions and replenishing the Budget Stabilization Fund, with the remainder to a few select uses. Both Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards and legislative leaders have offered to use the balance for capital outlay projects.

BC politicians may change, imprudence remains

Bossier City elected officials may change, but their stupid policy-making remains the same, reminding citizens that it will take awhile to reorient city policy in a better direction.

This week, a smooth-talking and highly-paid bureaucrat, in cahoots with a private contractor, and bullied by clueless chief executive and a councilor who benefits monetarily from the bureaucrat’s agency, conned the rubes that populate the Bossier City Council into putting city ratepayers, and maybe taxpayers, on the hook for tens of millions of dollars over the next 40 years in a highly speculative venture out of which it will own nothing, for reasons which have nothing to do with the city’s basic obligations to its residents.

The bureaucrat, Caddo-Bossier Port Commission Executive Director Eric England, finally closed the highly-advantageous deal for the Port by a 5-2 vote of the Council. This deal commits the city to pay an estimated $62 million to the Port so the Port can finance building of a water distribution and treatment facility that the city will run but the Port will own, within the next 40 years as long as the city authorizes even one drop of water to run through the system.

LA should appoint, not elect, insurance boss

 The time has come to eliminate one more opportunity for political aggrandizement and reduce the potential for corruption by making Louisiana’s commissioner of insurance an appointive rather than elective office.

Republican state Sen. Kirk Talbot has offered SB 208 for the legislative session soon to start, which would accomplish this. The commissioner would be appointed for a six year term, maximum two, by the governor from a list of three nominees by a committee of legislators, designees of other elected state executives, and representatives of related interest groups. It would apply after inauguration day, 2024. Because of a constitutional provision addressing statewide elected officials, two-thirds majorities would have to assent.

Louisiana goes overboard with its statewide elected officials, with its seven among the most of the states. Elected insurance commissioners aren’t common, with only nine other states having these and in a few instances their functions are combined with others.

That few states elect theirs makes sense when comparing the advantages and disadvantages. Certainly, elections bring a popular mandate to performing the job, but ideally the job largely comprises of administration without much chance to make policy that largely the Legislature dictates. If elected, where policy may be influenced by this official would have a bias towards lower rates, since voters overwhelmingly, if not unanimously, prefer lower rates over higher. However, this can prove problematic if a commissioner can and does influence rates to go too low that discourages policy-writing that either leaves gaps or forces the state to step in regardless at higher costs to other ratepayers or taxpayers.

LA dilatory response to waste huge bucks

In his zeal to keep from diminution Louisiana’s welfare state politics that have given it one of the worst qualities of life and economic development in the union, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards will cost state taxpayers hundred of millions of dollars over his administration of Medicaid in the next 14 months.

That stems from his choices in unwinding the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic extended Medicaid spending. Three years ago when the pandemic descended, Congress declared that it would increase its allocation to the states by 6.2 percent beyond its normal share paying for the program, to last through the last quarter after the president declared the pandemic over. Democrat Pres. Joe Biden, needlessly delaying congressional termination to let the gray train keep rolling in order to try to boost votes for his party’s candidates last November, didn’t do so until the end of last year.

This resulted in an over one-quarter boost nationally to Medicaid rolls. States probably preferred this, as the best estimates are that at the 6.2 level states actually made more despite the expanded clientele.

Name bill good to protect kids, reduce confusion

To date inexplicably hesitant to strengthen protections of children, this session the Louisiana Legislature need not whiff on a bill that not only does that, but that also calms fears of school employees and related personnel.

HB 81 by Republican state Rep. Raymond Crews would have school personnel address students by the names on their birth certificates, unless parental permission grants use of another, as well as use the pronoun associated with the student’s sex unless similar permission is granted. Even the pronoun consideration may be overridden if the alternate choice runs counter to the speaker’s religious or moral convictions.

This should come with welcome relief for school personnel. Emboldened by leftist politicians and media, the increasingly aggressive, even violent, eliminationist rhetoric and action emanating from transgender activist groups and followers puts at risk those who might commit spoken thoughtcrimes in the eyes of these special interests and draw their wrath. Only last year, a Kansas teacher was reprimanded and suspended for addressing a student by the student’s legal and enrolled name and forced her to conceal the student’s social transition from the student’s parents. Fortunately, she sought legal recourse and won a $95,000 judgment against school authorities. A law like HB 81 would remove worry from school personnel that they could face retribution for simply trying to communicate with students using the least ambiguous information about their names and the pronouns that apply.

Woke electoral wins in NO, LA may have crested

Woke may have crested among the electorate in Louisiana’s woke capital, if a couple of recent election results serve as indicators.

Earlier this year, Democrat state Rep. Royce Duplessis won a transfer to the state Senate in a battle with a colleague, Democrat state Rep. Mandie Landry. They vied to take the seat resigned last year by Democrat former state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson after graft landed her in the big house. That New Orleans district by population had a slight black plurality but by voter registration a slight white plurality. Duplessis is black and Landry is white.

Both are considered “progressive” Democrats; i.e., largely rejecting the role of government as a corrective agent of alleged imperfections in a society and economy with policy designed to promote equality of opportunity by instead embracing wholesale systemic change by use of government power to promote equality of outcome. “Woke” is a further extension, a condition that places individuals into silos depending upon their characteristics and where an understanding has been reached that those contained in the white, particularly male, particularly believing that biology determines sex, particularly acting heterosexually, and particularly practicing traditional Christianity silo(s) act in accordance with an irredeemably noxious set of cultural values that oppress all others, using disproportionate and illegitimately gained power, requiring that expression of these values must be censored and those adherents to these identities must defer to the wishes and values of all others identifying differently.

Bad BC water deal illustrates insider influence

Increasing debate about an issue should clarify. Instead, whether intended by certain Bossier City policy-makers and Port of Caddo-Bossier allies, another round over the proposed water deal between the two made matters murkier than ever – perhaps as a tactic to push it across the goal line.

Earlier this week the Bossier City Council held an unprecedented repeat workshop over a plan to have the Port build a water distribution and waste treatment facility with ancillaries that would connect to Bossier City’s system. The Port would own it but the city would maintain and operate it while paying the equivalent of the principal and interest on the debt behind it by providing after expenses half-priced services to the Port’s clients up to the point of the total amount of that – from representations previously made by Port Executive Director Eric England around $62 million – where beyond that the city would collect the entirety, for 40 years.

The idea has been troubled from the start when Republican Councilor David Montgomery – who has received over $600,000 in commissions from the Port since 2008 for writing its insurance policies – first put the item on the Council’s agenda. It was continued from that meeting, a workshop held, after initial approval pulled off the agenda the next meeting, and then this workshop redux held, indicating majority resistance and minority insistence to keep it alive.

Bill subverts value of part-time legislative pay

On a scale grander than any Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority plan, no party state Rep. Joe Marino wants to create more swamp at the Capitol by turning state legislators into full-time employees that can disconnect from their constituents’ lives and degrade policy outcomes.

Marino’s HB 149 would induce huge pay raises for state legislators starting next year. Currently, except for a few leaders who make roughly twice that, legislators receive $16,800 a year, although adding in per diem payments and any from committee work or special sessions often doubles that or more. The bill would boost that base salary to $60,000 and send leaders’ up almost half again or double that – and all indexed for inflation.

Keep in mind that only a handful of states pay an equivalent of the median household income or higher to their state legislators where most, like Louisiana, define these public servants as part-time employees. Louisiana would join this upper tier at these levels of base salary.

Advocate could close NWLA local news gap

Substantial change may be on the way to Shreveport-area media if apparent plans by Louisiana’s largest newspaper come to fruition.

The Advocate, based in Baton Rouge but with papers also operating in New Orleans, Lafayette, and Lake Charles, looks to be poking around to publishing a version in Shreveport. Its publisher recently toured the area meeting with various individuals. One idea seemingly broached was to set up a fund to supplement area reporting, hoping to draw bucks from local individuals and corporations.

Already the Advocate has something like this in place, called the Louisiana Investigative Journalism Fund. It has a relationship with the Greater New Orleans Foundation, headed up by political operative Andy Kopplin who prior to this gig worked for Republican former Gov. Mike Foster, Democrat former Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and Democrat former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. It allows for tax-free donations that the organization passes through and has attracted several high-profile donors plus a huge gift from the leftist Ford Foundation.

Politicized LA coastal report needs reworking

Hopefully at the conclusion of the public comment period that ends Mar. 25, the Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration will take seriously submissions and make the corrections appertaining to these that point out the anti-science aspects within the proposed Coastal Master Plan that risk of misspending billions of dollars.

Every five years (six actually in this case) Louisiana has committed to modifying the course it charts to shape the state’s coastline. In this task among other things, the state wants to put in place physical alterations that designed to preserve the coast that will ameliorate its disappearance, flooding, and adverse cultural and commercial impacts. The plan anticipates spending $50 billion split between restoration and risk reduction over the next half-century.

Unfortunately, politics has intruded upon the effort, with junk science accepted into the document’s core assumptions that postulates catastrophic anthropogenic global warming will cause environmental alterations that trigger massive changes to Earth’s geoforms. Following politically fashionable trendiness, the last, 2017 effort suffered from this primarily in its wild overestimation of eustatic sea level rise that in the course of its formation went, when compared to the actual data, from a high and improbable standard to one essentially unreasonable.