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Effect of Technology on Population

November 23, 2010 by tomaswell

By John Sachs
Guest Columnist

This discussion of the effects of technological advancements centers on population and societal concerns. I’d much rather Dr. Gary Stokley or Dr. Judith Howard discuss the sociological or psychological effects and ramifications of technological advancements, but I’ll take a layman’s stab at it. If either expert gives me a thumping, I’ll take my licks.

In 1800, the average American woman bore 7 children. By 1940, that birth rate had fallen to 2 per woman and has stayed roughly in this range since, with the exception of the “baby boomer” spike in the 1950’s.

Although 2 children per couple roughly equates to zero population growth, it takes approximately 70 years for that to take effect. That is, it takes roughly 70 years before a child is born, has children of his or her own, and then dies at age 70 just as a great-grandchild is born. In the interim, in absolute numbers, population continues to grow. Therefore, it will be a number of years before we see a shrinking population even if we are immediately successful at significantly reducing our current birth rate to that of China, Canada, and most European nations.

Several factors led to the dramatic decline in the birth rate mentioned above. Mechanization of farming created less demand for human labor. Tractors with cultivators, plows, discs, and harrows, and cotton pickers, grain threshers, and potato diggers are examples of such mechanization.

However, at this same time, industrialization was hitting its stride, and nonexistent child labor laws created a climate for hiring cheap child labor. These children lived at home and their meager wages went into the household coffer. So even as rural families were decreasing, urban families had reason to increase family size.

But urban families did not increase in size as much as rural families decreased. Why? First, during this 140 year period, wages increased six fold, and women chose to enter the workforce as contributors to the family income rather than staying at home having babies to work the farm or in the mills. And second, women were becoming educated and wanted more from life than being a subservient bearer (I won’t say beast) of burdens for their husbands.

Are you beginning to see that history is in the process of repeating itself as a result of today’s technological advancements? Again, fewer people doing more work. Educated men and women seeing themselves as more than just procreators of the species (parents) eking out a drab existence. Economic factors are again significantly affecting social behavior. But this time the world is a far different place.

The populations of almost every nation have reached a level where there are not enough jobs to sustain functioning, much less vibrant, economies. There are certainly not enough jobs for the unskilled and uneducated or under-educated. And there never again will be. The remedy for this is twofold: fewer people and a better educated and more skilled workforce. And both must be dealt with simultaneously.

One factor that will continue to reduce birth rates is gainful employment of better educated men and women of child-bearing age. Such couples choose to have smaller families — unlike the marginally employed and poorly educated couples OR SINGLE PARENT. Job success, rather than producing children, provides a sense of accomplishment. Also, educated couples provide better educational environments for their fewer children. This is Quality over Quantity.

And as to the issue of single parents, children born to unwed mothers now represent 40% of all American births. This is up by 25% in just the last 5 years. 5 years! That’s an explosion. Worse yet is the fact that 70% of Black children are born to unwed mothers. I’m not sure what I can or should say about that statistic, so I’ll leave it saying only that this is a problem of epidemic proportions that absolutely must be resolved.

Never mind the ethics regarding absentee and irresponsible fathers. Look only at the economic impact. In large measure, children born to unwed mothers and raised without two present and involved parents will not, on average, receive the education and skills needed to compete in the job market. And what will result from more and more such people comprising a significant percentage of the population? You fill in the blank. And I’ll bet in your worse case scenario you’ll underestimate the negative effects.

An educated, employable, and employed populace is an absolute necessity to national survival. America has already fallen to #18 in technology development, whereas less than 10 years ago we thought that we would always be #1. At #18 we are virtually out of the race. Remember, the country that develops the technology gets first crack at creating the jobs utilizing such technology.

That’s why La Tech’s Enterprise Center and others like it are so critically important. America’s math and reading skills rank so low that I don’t even care to report them to you. Suffice it to say that at our current rate, American children had best learn to speak and read Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish at a minimum so that they will be able to communicate with their bosses.

Anything, ANYTHING in the near-term that slows effective classroom education and skill-set training to our entire population will negatively impact our economic well-being and ultimately our national security. Keep this in mind as you listen to and discuss political debates.

Posted in Politics | Leave a Comment »

Jindal: Mastering the art of doing less with more

November 21, 2010 by tomaswell

Gov. Bobby Jindal’s office has announced that one of his top aides is leaving to pursue work in the private sector. The announcement immediately prompted two observations.

First, how is it, when thousands of Louisianians are out of work and unable to find jobs, Camille Conaway can simply walk away from a $110,000-per-year position—notice I said position, not job—and find work in the private sector? When hundreds of rank-and-file state employees are being laid off as the Christmas season approaches, it seems odd that she can jump to the head of the line—unless she has connections. Of course, we know no one from the governor’s office would intercede in her behalf while turning their backs on long-time dedicated civil service employees. Would they?

Well, why not? If it was good enough for former Commissioner of Administration Angelé Davis, why not, indeed.

Second, her departure gives the governor in absentia the perfect opportunity to lead by example.

If Jindal really wanted to make an impression (other than taking a helicopter to some remote protestant church in north Louisiana to give out federal stimulus money that he is against accepting on principle), then he would simply leave the position open, saving the state treasury that $110,000.

If he were really sincere about “doing more with less,” as he insists state agencies and state colleges and universities do, he would hold a press conference and, in his rapid-fire style of delivery say something like this:

“Three things: One, we are losing one of the administration’s top people. Two, we hate to see her go but after taking a close and critical look at my office, I have decided that I can do more with less. Three, the dozens of overpaid deadheads who remain are just gonna have to suck it up and do more work. They may, of course, be required to spend less time on Facebook but whatever it takes, we can, and will, do.”

That’s what he should have said. But that, unfortunately, is not what he did say.

In fact, he didn’t say anything. He left it to public relations flunky Kyle Plotkin.

Plotkin, in case you didn’t know, is from New Jersey. (Obviously, Jindal, who openly bemoans the exodus of Louisiana’s best and brightest to other states, was unable to find even one person from Louisiana who was qualified to grind out press releases.) Plotkin worked in various capacities for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, which or course makes him eminently qualified to do what no one from this state is capable of doing: paying lip service to policy decisions by the Louisiana governor/wunderkind/frequent flyer/wannabe best-seller author who knows what’s best for America but not necessarily for Louisiana. Speaking of which, how can Jindal call himself an author when his book was ghost written (meaning he didn’t write a complete sentence of his own memoir that he dares to call Leadership and Crisis)?

But as usual, I digress.

Conaway, Plotkin said, was primarily responsible for developing Jindal’s legislative package and also worked with legislators. One has to wonder: Might part of the legislative package she developed have been stripping the State Board of Ethics of its power? Okay, that’s a rhetorical question and again, I’m off-point.

Plotkin went on to say that Conaway will be replaced by Michael Dailey, who served as (get this) deputy secretary of programs at the state Department of Children and Family Services. Deputy secretary of programs? What in the name of all that’s holy would that entail? What programs? Deputy secretary of programs sounds awfully Barney Fifeish.

Nevertheless, Dailey will pull down the same $110,000 salary as his predecessor, Plotkin said.

So much for leading by example. So much for doing more with less.

Can’t wait for your next book, Guv: How to Run A Shell Game With Only One Shell.

Posted in Economy, Governor's Office, Jobs, Layoffs, Transparency | Leave a Comment »

A view from Pea Ridge: interpreting mid-term election

November 20, 2010 by tomaswell

By Judith Howard

My biggest disappointments in the recent mid-term elections were that Senator Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and Congressman Tom Perriello in Virginia lost their seats. Both are men with conviction, and are as clean as politicians can be.

Feingold co-sponsored legislation with McCain on campaign finance laws that our conservative Supreme Court dismantled in January. He voted against the financial reform bill because he said it wasn’t strong enough.

Perriello voted for health insurance reform, for Wall Street reform, and for a cap and trade bill even though he is from a district that went for John McCain in 2008, because he thinks those votes were the right thing to do. In his concession speech he said that Judgment Day was more important than Election Day. I hope both men will run again.

My biggest embarrassment was that David Vitter will once again be Louisiana’s senator. It gets tiresome to be the laughingstock of the country.

According to Republicans congressional leaders, voters in last week’s election sent a message that we want a repeal of healthcare, lower taxes, and smaller government. Of course that’s what they are going to say. That is not what they are going to do.

The Henry K. Kaiser Foundation’s did exit polling to see what the most important thing on voters’ minds was. Their polling found that 29% said jobs and the economy was most important, the deficit/government spending was most important for 9% of voters, and taxes ranked at the bottom with only 5% of voters.

There have been all kinds of interpretations of the election results. The best I’ve seen is this one by Matt Miller:

Voters punished a party they are furious with by giving more power to a party they can’t stand. That sounds about right to me. Capitol Hill Republicans have a 23% approval rating, according to a National Journal poll in October.

Why might voters be furious with Democrats? Because of the unemployment rate. Because we bailed out Wall Street, yet not one banker has done a perp walk for almost taking down the financial system. Because bankers have fraudulently foreclosed on peoples’ houses, yet not one of them has been held to account.

I suspect Democrats underestimate how much the lack of accountability underlies much of the discontent with Washington, especially with people who have lost not just their jobs, but also their homes as a result of being unemployed.
The unemployed and the foreclosed-upon have families and friends who, even though they may still have a job and a home, see how the system has worked for those who don’t, versus how it has worked for bankers.

Plus, corporate America spent anonymous millions to convince voters that Obama raised taxes, even though he didn’t; that health insurance reform is socialism, even though it expanded the market for private insurance companies; and that Nancy Pelosi is the devil incarnate, even though she got legislation passed to benefit the middle class.

In other words, those anonymous millions of dollars created an alternate reality that too many Americans bought into.

In order to show their displeasure with Democrats, people voted for the Party they hate. This makes no sense, but we shouldn’t be surprised by it. Angry behavior is seldom rational behavior.

The election results mean we will probably get watch gridlock for the next two years, because Republicans have no ideas beyond tax cuts, and no interest in governing. What they have is rhetoric—fine-sounding, but insincere words.

Take, for example, repealing health insurance reform. Ain’t gonna happen. Why? One reason is because insurance executives don’t want it to happen. As reported by Reuters, the CEO of Cigna said, “Repealing the new U.S. healthcare law would be a waste of time, but there is room to improve it.”

Insurance CEOs don’t like parts of the law, such as not being able to reject people for pre-existing conditions, but they love the individuate mandate, because it brings them millions of new customers.

Not unsurprisingly, the individual mandate is the only part of the law that voters disapprove of, (where’s all that personal responsibility when you need it?). According to a Henry K. Kaiser Foundation survey last week, other sections of the law received in the neighborhood of a 70% approval rating.

I predict congressional Republicans will engage in all kinds of posturing about trying to repeal health insurance reform in order to placate their Tea Party base. Come 2012, however, the law will still be in place, but Republican governors will try to gum up the works and sabotage the insurance exchanges in whatever ways they can.

The mid-term election has come to an end. Now the 2012 presidential election has begun. Why do I say that? Because rather than groan behind the scenes, some in the Republican establishment have started to publicly turn on Queen Sarah–they do not want her to win the nomination. This could get interesting.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

Jindal’s lies: making Goebbels proud

November 15, 2010 by tomaswell

It seems it’s come down to this: Gov. Bobby Jindal is either a pathological liar or he is completely disconnected with reality.

Or he’s blithely residing in a parallel universe where myth is truth and truth is only a concept, a suggestion, to be rolled out only when it plays better than the myth. And that ain’t often.

Jindal, in New York Monday to tout his book Leadership in Crisis, told the nation on Fox and Friends that his administration had “cut taxes, cut spending, and balanced the budget.”

Balanced the budget?

Whatever the governor in absentia has been smoking has apparently ensconced him snugly in his happy place. To say he sees the world through rose-colored glasses during his all-too-frequent appearances in some place other than Louisiana would be to belabor the obvious.

And, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, therein lies the rub. The governor, you see, just isn’t in Louisiana that much these days. First there were the fellow Republican candidates in more than a dozen states who apparently needed his help to get elected to Congress, the Senate, or to various governors’ offices. Then, once the elections were over, it was off on a 10-day national tour to promote his book about some vague perception of leadership.

Following New York, where he was scheduled for the Today Show and Fox and Friends and several interviews, he is scheduled to fly to San Diego for the Republican Governors Association annual conference and on Friday he will attend a fundraiser in support of his gubernatorial reelection campaign in Los Angeles. And just why would anyone in Los Angeles be concerned about a governor’s race in Louisiana anyway? Did either of the California gubernatorial candidates hold any fundraisers in Louisiana this year? I think you can check that box NO.

Then, on Saturday he will speak at the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara before traveling to Washington, D.C. later that day to hold media interviews for his book. He will return to Baton Rouge, theoretically, on Tuesday, November 23.

Meanwhile, home-schooled subordinate Timmy Teepel apparently will be solving the state’s financial woes back home in Jindal’s absence now that he is back from working on behalf of southern Republican gubernatorial candidates. Teepel apparently is being groomed as the next Karl Rove to Jindal’s Ronald Reagan. Both comparisons are, of course absurd to the point of cruel parody.

But I digress. Let’s return to the “balanced budget.”

As of this writing, the state budget deficit is $106 million, hardly a “balanced budget.”

Federal stimulus money, approved by Congress in August, earmarked $147 million to Louisiana’s parish school systems with the stipulation that the money go to salaries of teachers, administrators and support staff. No problem: Jindal simply pulled an identical amount from school funding to plug the deficit. Never mind the adverse effect it had on the local school districts who had already factored the stimulus money into their operating budgets.

But wait, there’s more. No sooner had Jindal “balanced the budget” than it was announced by Associated Press on Monday that the state budget underestimated the number of students attending public schools this year by 9,000, creating a $42 million shortfall in the state’s Minimum Foundation Program (MPF) which pays schools on a per-student basis.

So much for a “balanced budget.”

Not that State Treasurer John Kennedy hasn’t been trying to tell us this. Kennedy, sounding more and more like a potential challenger to Jindal from within his own party, has been critical all along of the legislature for bloating the state budget from $24.2 billion to $26 billion by using “one-time” money at the time when all signs pointed to lower tax revenues and a looming budget crisis.

Kennedy cited the legislature’s use of $198 million in “rainy day” funds, $242 million from delinquent taxpayers, $1.5 billion in one-time federal funds, $17 million from the settlement of a lawsuit against a drug company and money taken from the state emergency response fund as evidence of legislators’ recklessness and fiscal irresponsibility.

Jindal, in his interview with Fox and Friends, http://video.foxnews.com/, cited the need for the president to have the benefit of the line-item veto.

President Bill Clinton lobbied for and got the line-item veto but it was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. It remains something of a mystery as to why Jindal would call for the presidential line-item veto; as governor, Jindal has the line-item veto but has used it so sparingly during his tenure as to render it all but useless. He has literally allowed the legislature to run amok with embarrassingly wasteful spending bills without so much as a whimper of protest. At least by not invoking the veto more often, he is conserving ink.

Kennedy also has called for the reduction of the number of state civil service employees by attrition, or simply not replacing workers when they quit or retire. Jindal, on the other hand, has opted for sweeping layoffs—the latest round scheduled two weeks after Christmas.

Kennedy may be a demagogue, but much of what he says makes sense.

Jindal, on the other hand, offers gooney-babble about leadership in crisis and his heroic feats of cutting taxes and spending and of balancing the budget. The lies are so ludicrous as to border on pathos—or to invoke outrage among those who know the truth in something other than abstract terms.

But there is one thing to be said about his arrogance, bravado, and outright distortions: he would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

Posted in Budget, Campaign Contributions, Civil Service, Governor's Office, Layoffs, Veto | 2 Comments »

Bobby Jindal: Indian Giver (subtitled: Where’s the leadership?)

November 14, 2010 by tomaswell

At the risk of sounding racist, Gov. Bobby Jindal has to be considered as a true Indian giver. More accurately, an Indian giver with no leadership qualities.

There. I’ve said it. Someone had to.

Gov. “I’m not taking and federal stimulus money” Jindal back in September finally acquiesced and made formal application for $147 million in education funding. That was the amount for which Louisiana was deemed eligible from the $26 billion federal stimulus bill that was passed by Congress in August.

State Superintendent of Education Paul—“I didn’t know it was improper to use a state vehicle for dozens of personal trips to Chicago”—Pastorek said the state was making the application for the money because there were “no policy strings attached.”

“No strings” notwithstanding, federal guidelines required that the money go directly to the local school districts and that the money be used to pay salaries and benefits for teachers, school administrators and other staff.

The local school district officials were ecstatic. In some parishes it had already been determined that the local districts could no longer afford to pay substitute teachers when regular teachers were out sick and that the regular teachers would have to pay them out of their own salaries. Suddenly it seemed there was relief for the local officials who worked the infusion of cash into their operating budgets.

Then, just as suddenly, Jindal last week pulled the rug from under the local districts. More precisely, he pulled the money.

He created his own strings, it seems, choosing to commandeer the money to plug the $106 million hole in the administration’s budget and to offset cuts to higher education, an area he has already gutted with earlier cuts. In fact, one might suspect that the political backlash against his higher ed cuts were such that in grasping for an answer, he fell upon the brilliant idea of jerking the $147 from public education. Problem solved or leadership void?

Jindal’s latest misstep lays bare the sad fact that he really has no plan for pulling Louisiana out of the current fiscal morass. He is every bit as lost in facing this crisis as Gov. Kathleen Blanco was in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But give Gov. Blanco her due: her crisis was not self-inflicted, but was a natural disaster with which nearly anyone would have been ill-equipped to deal.

Jindal, on the other hand, had to see this coming. We were warned that the legislature should not be spending one-time money from the hurricane recovery funds in the manner it was. No one listened; not the legislature and certainly not the governor who was loath to use the line item veto at his disposal.

And now, in the middle of a fiscal crisis and with an even bigger one looming next year, what does Jindal do? He scoots off to dozens of states to campaign on behalf of Republican candidates for governor, Congress, and the U.S. Senate, leaving home-schooled subordinates to grapple with the budget deficit. For those not especially good at history, Richard Nixon did the same thing in preparation for his successful 1968 run at the president’s office, except he did it as a private citizen. He lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and then somehow managed to lose the California governor’s election to Pat Brown, prompting his famous line, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any longer.”

Instead, Nixon, not as a sitting governor ignoring responsibilities to his state, began working on behalf of Republican candidates, amassing in the process, a hatful of chits that he was able to redeem in 1968. That’s exactly what Jindal seems to be doing. He was absent so often during the state’s worsening financial crisis, that the president of the LSU student body fired off a letter to a New Hampshire newspaper asking the governor to return home.

Jindal insists he has the job he wants. If that’s true, he should stay home and do that job. Instead of staying home once the November elections were over, however, he now embarks to a tour to tout his book, Leadership and Crisis. That begs the question, “what leadership?” Jindal “presided over Louisiana’s healthcare system at age 24, headed the University of Louisiana system at 27, became a U.S. congressman at 33, and was elected governor of Louisiana at 36,” according to the Amazon.com promotion of his book. Do we see a trend here? The two systems that he headed under former Gov. Mike Foster, higher education and health care, are the two agencies that he appears determined to dismantle.

Again, the question: “what leadership?”

Jindal had his chance. He blew it. He could have slashed away at the Capital Outlay Bill in the session that ended last summer, but he didn’t. He could easily have cut nearly half-a-billion in wasteful spending from the bill, but he didn’t. He could bring himself to cut only $9.4 million. And now he has backed himself into a corner.

Where was the leadership, Gov. Jindal?

Instead of spending millions of dollars purchasing golf courses, the governor could have said no. But he didn’t.

Where was the leadership?

In ordering deeper cuts recently, Jindal told department heads the state needed more leadership and less whining. Immediately after making that brash statement, the state’s leader in abstensia left for Pittsburgh, PA, to campaign for yet another Republican candidate.

Where was the leadership?

Just in case you may have missed it, Governor, here again is a partial list of inappropriate appropriations that, had they been vetoed on one of the days that you were in the state, the financial mess in which we now find ourselves might have been averted.

That would be real leadership.

So, please read these during your next flight to some other state to promote your leadership book:

• $800,000 for land acquisition for the proposed Allen Parish Reservoir;
• $1.4 million for the proposed Bayou Dechene Reservoir in Caldwell Parish;
• $2.6 million for the Washington Parish Reservoir Commission Feasibility study;
• $17.2 million for Bayou Segnette Festival Park land acquisition and sports complex improvements;
• $28 million for modifications to the Performing Arts Center in Jefferson Parish;
• $2 million for construction of a playground Basketball Gym in Orleans Parish;
• $1.8 million for construction of the Little Theatre of Shreveport;
• $2.6 million for a new Westbank YMCA in Algiers;
• $2 million for the New Orleans Music Hall of Fame;
• $6 million for construction of a new courthouse in Baton Rouge;
• $2.8 million for the Dryades YMCA in New Orleans;
• $5.4 million for the Red River Waterway Commission;
• $7.7 million for the renovation of the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette;
• $2.5 million for improvements to the Coteau Water System in St. Martin and Iberia parishes;
• $2.4 million for the Union Parish Law Enforcement District;
• $1.8 million for construction for the Robinson Film Center in Caddo Parish;
• $12 million for construction of a convention center complex in Shreveport;
• $3.8 million for a new tennis center in Orleans Parish;
• $4.7 million for construction of the Louisiana Artist Guild Arts Incubator in New Orleans;
• $26.5 million for expansion and construction of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

Millions more were spent on construction projects that included recreational facilities, councils on aging, courthouses, sheriffs’ offices, jails, drainage projects, work on parish and municipal road and street construction projects, community centers, and water systems.

As if that were not enough, when legislators found extra money lying around, as they always seem to do during each legislative session, the House quickly pushed HB 76 through, appropriating an additional $33 million in local pork projects. Some of those expenditures:

• $150,000 for the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame in Winnfield;
• $500,000 for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities;
• $500,000 to “organizations which assist small towns and rural areas with their water and wastewater systems;”
• $250,000 for construction of an animal shelter in St. Charles Parish;
• $1 million to the Lafayette Parish Consolidated Government for infrastructure construction.

Where was the leadership?

Posted in BESE, Education, Golf Courses, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators, Revenue, Transparency, Water Reservoirs | Tagged | 2 Comments »

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