Across the Wide Missouri: American Red-State Politics: You Really Could Not Make This Stuff Up: Bobby Jindal--and More!: Live from The Roasterie CCCXXIV: September 5, 2014
Ian Millhiser: Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Bizarre Scheme To Stop His Own Education Plan By Suing The Obama Administration: "Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) actively pushed for [the CommonCore] 2012 law...
...Recently, however, Jindal decided that he actually opposes Common Core, although he’s not been successful in convincing White, the state education board or the state legislature to join him in opposition. So Jindal... is suing the Obama Administration in federal court. If you are confused, you should be. Louisiana’s decision to embrace Common Core standards was... made by Louisiana state officials and Louisiana state lawmakers. One of them was Bobby Jindal....
The Obama Administration... administer[s]... programs... which offer money to states... [in the] Common Core.... The crux of Jindal’s lawsuit, however, is that the grant programs... violate the Constitution and federal law because they force Louisiana to enter into an entirely voluntary program that it did, in fact, enter into voluntarily.... This claim... is false...
Kansas City Star: Gov. Sam Brownback and his staff must stop trying to fool Kansans on tax cuts: :In August, individual income tax revenue was $11.1 million below budget estimates...
...or a full 6 percent lower than predicted. That’s a sobering detail you won’t hear from Gov. Sam Brownback or his staff. They continue to promote the myth that tax cuts will bring in more money — ignoring the reality that Kansas’ budget ended the last fiscal year $300 million below expectations. State officials again undermined their credibility after the August numbers were released. In a statement, the Department of Revenue didn’t report the $11.1 million shortfall in income tax receipts. Instead, it opted to say August revenue had been $10.3 million higher than in the same month in 2013, “an indication that either more Kansans are working or they are earning higher wages.” That was extremely misleading. The agency didn’t acknowledge the fact that income tax revenue in July had been an alarming $15.5 million lower than it had been in July 2013. So for the first two months of the new fiscal year, the state actually had collected $5 million less in those taxes than it did in the last year.
To paraphrase the Department of Revenue’s logic, that must mean either fewer Kansans are working or they are earning lower wages. Right, Gov. Brownback?
Tony Pugh: States that decline to expand Medicaid give up billions in aid: "If the 23 states that have rejected expanding Medicaid under the 2010 health care law continue to do so for the next eight years...
...they'll pay $152 billion to extend the program in other states – while receiving nothing in return. This massive exodus of federal tax dollars from 2013 through 2022 would pay 37 percent of the cost to expand Medicaid in the 27 remaining states and Washington, D.C., over that time.... Non-expansion states would see direct benefits from their $152 billion only if they reversed course and expanded eligibility for Medicaid, the state and federal health program for low-income Americans. The health care law provides financial incentives for states to extend Medicaid coverage to adults who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level....
“Here is money that is pretty much there for the asking, and these states are turning it down. And in the meantime, their taxpayers are paying taxes that fund expansions in states that are moving forward. It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Sherry Glied, the dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. The federal funding under Medicaid expansion also would stimulate economic activity, boost tax revenue and create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the non-expansion states, experts say. “This additional use of medical services not only brings more federal dollars, but hospitals, physicians and pharmacies would likely hire more people, keep longer hours and probably raise wages. All of which leads to indirect spending and subsequent rounds of spending that generate tax revenues and, in general, the expansion of the economy within states,” said Michael Morrisey, a health economics professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham....
Last week, Pennsylvania became the ninth state with a Republican governor to accept the expansion. Like Arkansas and Iowa, Pennsylvania won approval from the Obama administration to bypass the Medicaid program and use the federal funding to help low-income residents buy private coverage instead. Indiana and Utah, two other states with Republican governors, also are working with the Obama administration to enact their own versions of the Medicaid expansion. Many experts think that kind of federal flexibility will help Medicaid expansion work in most red states one day. But in the run-up to the first midterm elections since the health law was fully implemented, expansion remains a hot-button issue....
Virginia forgoes $5.2 million in federal funding every day that state lawmakers don’t agree to expand Medicaid, Democratic Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam said. By his account, that’s well over a billion dollars already. “That’s money we'll never be able to get back,” Northam said...
