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By Stephen Winham (Special to LouisianaVoice)
Bob Mann has done an excellent piece on this: http://bobmannblog.com/2015/06/02/shell-game-shouldnt-higher-education-leaders-have-more-integrity-than-bobby-jindal/#more-5553
Many news stories have been written about it. I don’t have to tell you what it does – nothing, except appease Grover Norquist and, by association, our governor.
Oh, wait, it does actually do something else – It adds to the plethora of recent stories about our state and governor that keep us the laughingstock of the nation. If the national media starts playing this up, it really is going to seem like they are reprinting a story from The Onion. The name, itself, is a joke – on many levels: Student Assessment for a Valuable Education – Think about it.
How this utterly ridiculous bill can be treated as the salvation for higher education makes a mockery of the value we allegedly place on higher education. It is beyond a shell game. It is so stupid, in concept and premise, as to make it hard to treat seriously. I get angry just thinking that such a thing could be introduced, much less actually passed. It is difficult to give the bill enough credibility to even read it – and reading it doesn’t help much.
Create a fee. Don’t collect the fee, but give a tax credit for it as if it had been paid. Send the money that would have been collected had the fee been paid to the Board of Regents to be distributed to colleges and universities.
If there is really no fee, where is the SAVE money coming from? The fiscal note shows no numbers. Is the money going to magically appear out of nowhere, be printed by the state treasury, or what? If there is no money, how can this possibly help higher education? If there is to actually be money in the fund, where will it come from?
After you create a fund that has no source, you pretend this non-existent tax credit offsets the same amount in unrelated tax increases.
Grover Norquist must be about the most powerful person in the United States. He gets thousands of politicians to sign a {non- legally binding} pledge to not raise taxes no matter what happens. No matter how stupid or irresponsible it makes them look, these people, including our governor , treat the pledge as if lightening will strike them dead if they don’t. And the legislature follows suit.
Or at least John Alario does. The Senate President (R-Westwego) has vowed to overcome defeat of the measure by the House by inserting the SAVE bill in every piece of legislation passed by the House in order to force passage.
How can this be? In local politics, we would assume anybody with that much power must have a video of the person he controls doing something Bobby Jindal would consider a mortal sin (like subscribing to the theory of climate change, endorsing the metric system or worse, equal pay for women). So, is it possible Grover has a video vault with thousands of pornos of every politician who has signed his pledge? That makes almost as much sense as SAVE.
Louisiana Voice 
“SAVE” is rank insanity as you have pointed out, Mr. Winham. If this absurdity actually passes, we citizens need to rise up and go to court to have every senator and representative who voted for it interdicted for insanity and removed from office. We could send them to one of the mental health hospitals but Jindal closed most of them . There’s room at Jackson but they would have to fight someone to get something to eat there.
Higher education IS an important service that the state provides and SHOULD be thoroughly well funded, as if colleges and universities truly are something that we take pride in, as in the way that we often like to say that they are “our pride.” Without any ifs ands or buts. Without any foolishness. And if that means that those who are well off have to be paying some taxes, if businesses can’t get a special tax break, if the TEA Party militants will be upset and so on, then so be it.
I’ve said it before, higher education officials in Louisiana are bought and paid for toadies who do not care about higher education they care about keeping their salaries intact
Is it possible that our legislators are so incapable of connecting the dots that they somehow think that this SAVE scheme actually works? That well might be the case. They uniformly disregard scientific proof, so I can only presume that they think the world works as a result of magic. In Grovernor bobby’s (spelling and capitalization intentional) Magic Kingdom delusions rule.
No, it is they just think that we the electorate are too stupid to figure it out.
No! They are just that u enlightened. Stupid too, perhaps.
Something is so seriously wrong that they are spending time on an obvious shell game than actually doing something that will address the problem. Magical thinking for sure. Actually completely delusional.
I might feel better about it if they were Hogwarts graduates and if Hogwarts actually existed.
The cartoon is great!
earthmother, that is twice you’ve mentioned something about not having enough food at a state mental hospital. Do you have any links to any articles about that? I would definitely like to see them if they’re out there.
Fredster – I am acquainted with several people who work at East LA State Mental Health System hospital (ELHMS pronounced “elms” and generally known as Jackson after the town it is located in). Mountains of hard evidence prove the private contractor for food services consistently fails to prepare and serve enough food for all the patients. Staff have been very involved in trying to fix this situation to no avail – a fix is always stopped somewhere in the Bienville Building that houses DHH HQ. The patients, BTW, are a challenging population, being mostly forensic mental health admits.
I believe the contractor is Healthcare Services Group, a nationwide company. The name was published in an Advocate story some time ago (which we can’t locate right now) when it was heard that medical staff circulated a photo of a dinner plate containing one hotdog and 12 green peas, which the contractor considered a proper serving for adults. Staff believe that area elected officials have long been aware of this situation; the local state representative was quoted the article.
We are told the same vendor has the contract in all the remaining DHH 24-hour facilities, so staff assumes the problem is widespread throughout the system.
Oh dear Lord, that is just obscene! Not quite starving them to death but just short of it. Is that the hospital where they consolidated all the patients from SE LA Hospital in Mandeville?
Oh but look earthmother, it’s a great stock to own:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3234366-health-care-services-group-the-forgotten-health-care-dividend-growth-stock
I wonder how many of our political folks have stock in it?
This editorial is all that turned up on the internet so far. State Rep. Kenny Havard has tried every year to get a bill passed AND NOT VETOED that would provide legislative oversight of these privatization contracts. The leges pass his bills and jindal vetoes them. Maybe this year’s bill, making its way through the process, will be part of the coming veto override party.
Lake Charles American Press
Editorial: Transparency, accountability should be part of privatization
Friday, August 30, 2013 5:40 PM
Bobby Jindal is a huge proponent of privatization. He’s all for the government hiring private companies to take care of things the state government used to take care of all by itself, but didn’t do that efficiently.
Privatization is not a bad thing. The issue, though, is that government contracts worth millions of dollars are signed and legislators don’t get a chance to look at these contracts beforehand. And sometimes these contracted companies don’t deliver the goods and aren’t doing what they said they would do.
One state lawmaker wants to be allowed to review the contracts before they get signed. Jindal and his team don’t think this is a good idea. They argue that this “would add another layer of bureaucracy to an already burdensome process.”
Since the Legislature is constitutionally bound to oversee government finances, state Rep. Kenny Havard, R-Jackson, believes legislators should at least get to read the contracts before they are signed.
A legislative audit last week turned up some unpleasant findings with one state contract that had turned over management of state behavioral health programs to a private company.
A Pennsylvania-based nutritional services company was hired to serve Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System. But one day the company “ran out of food,” according to the Baton Rouge Advocate. So they ordered 400 hamburgers from McDonald’s to feed the hospital patients.
This incident and other complaints from constituents were the catalyst that caused Havard to investigate further. He found out food was often delivered late to these patients, often with spoiled milk and without meat or vegetables.
As a result, Havard attempted to pass a “Privatization Review Act” in the Legislature that would have allowed lawmakers to look over contracts worth more than $5 million before the state signed them.
Back in May, Havard’s bill was killed during the last session by the Senate Finance Committee. His bill made it through two committees and the full House before it was killed by “the acolytes of Gov. Bobby Jindal, the self-proclaimed champion of transparency,” according to Advocate columnist Mark Ballard.
Louisiana taxpayers are currently paying for at least 12,000 such contracts. It’s our money. To say that a little transparency and accountability should be a part of these privatization efforts is an understatement.
This editorial was written by a member of the American Press Editorial Board. Its content reflects the collaborative opinion of the Board, whose members include Bobby Dower, Jim Beam, Crystal Stevenson and Donna Price.
I found The Advocate article listed in a search but then it seems like the paper scrubbed the article. I wonder why? 😯
I did find this:
http://www.lpb.org/index.php/publicsquare/topic/04_14_-_state_contracts_101/04_14_-_state_contracts_101
and if you search there is a pdf that you’ll find which mentions the company and the issue there at the hospital.
EXCERPT FROM A TYLER BRIDGES REPORT ON SENATE ACTION TODAY:
“Laughter began to break out from individual senators throughout the chamber. It was prompted by an amendment to the SAVE fund by state Sen. Eric LaFleur, D-Ville Platte, that had just popped up on their computer screens.
LaFleur’s amendment proposed that it be renamed the DUMB fund.
“It describes the bill for what it is, dumb,” LaFleur told his colleagues, as they continued to laugh.” I’m just trying to be candid for the public.”
An angry Donahue strode the microphone at the front of the Senate chamber.
“I’m insulted by it,” Donahue said. “This makes a mockery of what we’re doing.”
i wonder if making a mockery of a mockery diminishes or enhances the original mockery.
It’s sad that LSU is preparing for bankruptcy just as employees start to staff the new IBM building. Jindal’s promise was that it would pull IT graduates from LSU, but now I guess they’ll have to get them from India.
Gee, I wonder what Jindal’s and Norquist’s position on H-1B visas is?
EXCERPT FROM PAR ANALYSIS OF SAVE:
“SAVE is a misuse of the tax system. The purpose of a tax system is to generate revenue to support needed public services. SAVE does not generate dollars for the state. Also, it does not promote any desired behavior
such as a business tax incentive or credit might. It is being used merely to masquerade and promote tax increases.)
THE PAR ISSUE PAPER IS HERE:
Click to access loadDocument.cfm
The Louisiana budget has ballooned since Katrina. It now mirrors the budget of NC, a state twice as populated. NC also managed a $400M surplus in 2015.
Louisiana needs to reduce the size and scope of government.
It needs to reduce entitlements.
Raising taxes isn’t the answer. And Grover Norquist doesn’t have a monopoly on everyone against raising taxes.
That is a view often expressed and you, no doubt, come by it honestly. However, I would ask you look at this in a real world light. Generalities aside, exactly what would you cut and where? If it is easy to do what you propose, Governor Jindal has had 8 years to recommend budgets that do so. He, too, claims we need to cut expenses not raise taxes, Why has he not made recommendations to do it – ever? Why has nobody else recommended specific cuts to balance our state budget and included what the effect would be? As one example, a handful of people have recommended ending much of the state support to local governments as a solution, but that ignores completely the effect of those cuts on local governments. Do we need to make more cuts? Yes, and silly contracts have been pointed to more than once, for example. Are there enough realistic cuts out there to be considered a real solution? If so, why after the most recent $7 million wasted A & M contract and many others before it, have the cuts not been made?
If you are asking me to defend an absentee governor, I can’t do it. He is terrible.
As far as cuts? There aren’t easy choices to make. And they aren’t going to be popular with anyone. Balancing budgets are a constitutional obligation. I guarantee I could get some experts in a room and hash out a balanced budget. But you have to be present to make that happen..not in New Hampshire or Iowa campaigning.
Piyush JIndal actually has cut the budget and in fact by quite a bit — I believe that the budget in 2007 or so was around $32 billion and so if it’s close to $24 or $25 billion now then that’s hardly insignificant (though I believe that much of that has been through the privatization of hospitals, Office of Group Benefits, etc., cut backs in state funding for higher education and through not giving merit increases to state employees).
Having said that, I am ever so tired of seeing these comparisons that the conservatives seem to like to make between LA and other states while they call for meat-axe cutbacks in the aggregate because, as the conservative logic goes, the budget as a whole is too high for their liking (one suspects that state budget would not be to their liking unless it were zero except for state police, prisons and the court system). What’s tiring is how very facile such comparisons are, given how LA alone among the states has a homestead exemption nearly as large as it does and how that factor alone drives the whole structure of the state budget. How about we eliminate or dramatically reduce the homestead exemption first and then have our local governments collect revenues that they need through local property taxes, as they do in most other states, instead of relying on the support from the state that they receive to operate as they do now and then thereby be able to make a genuine apples-to-apples comparison of the LA state budget that those in other states?
LA “needs to reduce entitlements?” Is that what’s really the large chunk of the state budget that can easily be cut way back to generate tens or hundreds of millions in savings? How about some hard numbers, as in a reference to exactly where in the state budget you’re talking about to back that up that (again) rather facile assertion that conservatives seem to always like to make?
LA “needs to reduce the size and scope of government?” What exactly is it that the state does right now that it should not be doing? Should all of the state colleges and universities be privatized? The prisons? The state police? Enforcement of regulations to protect the environment? How about some actual concrete suggestions rather than facile assertions?
Finally, even though, as I have pointed out, the state budget has in fact been significantly reduced, the actual results have not borne that doing so has been beneficial in any significant way to the state’s business climate, economy or quality of life for most residents (where are the tax receipts that are supposed to be growing like wildfire, as conservatives would seem to predict, from the wondrous benefit to the economy from shrinking government). I submit that, if anything, cut backs in government spending will only take energy and vitality out of the state’s economy and lead to more and more fiscal problems. That’s what’s happened over the past 7 years and will most likely continue to happen if we keep on turning to this conservative approach of doing things.