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Bobby Jindal cuts spending in Lousiana and imposes accountability

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Bobby and Supriya Jindal
Bobby and Supriya Jindal: no teleprompter needed

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Found this recent blog post over at Governor Bobby Jindal’s blog. (H/T The Maritime Sentry).

Previously, I had blogged about his refusal to take bailout funds, his defense of Rush Limbaugh on CNN, and his plans for education reform in Louisiana.

In the new post, he talks about cutting spending and imposing more reporting and accountability on the government departments:

Our budget will decrease by 9.8 percent compared to last year’s budget, including a 12.7 percent decrease in state funds… We have asked agencies and departments across state government to provide meaningful performance data, so that we can target underperforming and out-of-date programs while protecting high performing programs from severe reductions.

He outlines specific measures to deal with the economic downturn:

School funding based on performance

First, are calling on the Board of Regents to implement a new funding formula that will reform higher education spending. While the current formula too often rewards enrollment alone and results in duplication, a new formula should reward performance, and, for example, encourage schools to target specific programs that will provide degrees in high demand professions – aligning funding with our state’s economic needs.

Eliminate unnecessary government departments

Next, we will create a Commission on Streamlining Government, whose mission will be to examine agencies and departments throughout state government to ensure that their roles and missions are still relevant today.

Improve efficiency of civil service

Third, we will work to reduce the size of state government by implementing civil service reforms that encourage state workers to do their jobs well – not just to reach tenure.

Facilitate future spending cuts

Dedicated funds will have to be just as transparent as discretionary funds, and will sunset every four years beginning in 2010. We will change the current laws so that discretionary funds can be cut up to 10 percent, whereas currently they can only be cut 5 percent, and to remove the two year limit on cutting these funds.

Improve transparency and accountability in education spending

Finally, we will reform the current MFP funding process for our state’s K-12 schools. As the MFP funds are given to school district as a block grant, there is not enough accountability for how the funds are spent. We will require that beginning in FY11 districts must fully account for how these dollars are spent, and the Department of Education will develop an easy to use website allowing taxpayers to see how their hard-earned dollars are being spent.

The post goes on to discuss other initiatives, such as increasing economic growth. And that is when you read this startling statement:

The retention and expansion of jobs has been a top priority of this administration, and we will continue working to expand our economy in the coming months and years. In December, we were the only state in the nation to add jobs, and in January, we were the only state in the nation whose unemployment rate when down and not up.

Sigh. Shouldn’t we have elected Bobby Jindal instead of Mr. Teleprompter-Reader?

To find out more about Bobby Jindal, check out these links:

Interview with Rush Limbaugh (PDF)
The American Spectator: Hope Floats on the Bayou
RedState.com: Bobby Jindal Saves Louisiana
Townhall.com: The Future of Conservatism (Isn’t Running for President)
The Weekly Standard: Another Winner from Winn Parish
The National Review: The Governor Is Right
The Wall Street Journal: Bayou Boy Wonder
Townhall.com: Want real hope and change? Try Louisiana

Commentary

Walter Williams evaluates Sweden’s single-payer health care system

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Walter Williams is my second favorite active economist, just behind Thomas Sowell. (I also like John Lott, Robert P. Murphy and Jennifer Roback Morse – see my blogroll for links) In a recent article, Williams takes a look at how well Sweden’s single-payer, socialized health-care system is working out for its customers. The productive Swedish taxpayer forks over a lot of money to the government. What do they get in return?

First, what is socialized medicine? (which we are moving toward, since porkulus passed)

  1. Producers pay huge amounts of taxes to the government .
  2. Low-achievers pay nothing, since they have no income.
  3. When you want treatment, you have to get in line behind everyone else – especially behind special interest groups, such as people wanting sex-changes.
  4. The taxation is compulsory, the treatment of patients is at the government’s discretion.

Williams begins his article by evaluating the UK’s National Health Service:

A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, “Delay, Denial and Dilution,” written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the NHS health care services are just about the worst in the developed world. The head of the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care. Twelve percent of specialists surveyed admitted refusing kidney dialysis to patients suffering from kidney failure because of limits on cash. Waiting lists for medical treatment have become so long that there are now “waiting lists” for the waiting list.

And then there’s Canada single-payer socialized system:

…after a Canadian has been referred to a specialist, the waiting list for gynecological surgery is four to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks. Toronto-area hospitals, concerned about lawsuits, ask patients to sign a legal release accepting that while delays in treatment may jeopardize their health, they nevertheless hold the hospital blameless. Canadians have an option Britainers don’t: close proximity of American hospitals. In fact, the Canadian government spends over $1 billion each year for Canadians to receive medical treatment in our country.

The article cites Sven R. Larson, who recently completed the book “Lesson from Sweden’s Universal Health System: Tales from the Health-care Crypt,” published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (Spring 2008). The first thing about socialized health care is that you don’t pay for treatment like you shop at Wal-Mart. The government takes your money and makes sure that everyone is treated equally, regardless of each individual’s earned income and lifestyle choices.

Mr. D., a Gothenburg multiple sclerosis patient, was prescribed a new drug. His doctor’s request was denied because the drug was 33 percent more expensive than the older medicine. Mr. D. offered to pay for the medicine himself but was prevented from doing so. The bureaucrats said it would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicine.

When health care is free for consumers, demand increases. Doctors and drug companies stop producing since the government won’t let them make a profit. Since the government is the single-payer, then the only way to stop the shortage is to ration medical services, often based on leftist victim ideology. Socialists don’t trust you to make your own decisions about how you earn income or how you spend it.

Here’s a bit more from the article:

Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden’s third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden’s National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography.

Wow, that smacks of fascism! But that is where socialism inevitably leads. In Canada, you can’t even buy your own drugs and treatment, even if the government puts you on a waiting list (dying list?), or if it won’t pay for treatment at all. Private purchases of health care or medical drugs are illegal in Canada. (except for Quebec, oddly enough, because of a recent court decision).

The problem with a system in which low-risk producers pay for the services, but don’t use them while high-risk victims use the services, but don’t pay for them, is that there is no incentive for people to be healthy. As people act more and more recklessly, the government steps in and starts controlling their lives in order to reduce costs. Fascism.

Socialized medicine redistributes wealth in order to equalize the outcomes of good lifestyle choices and poor lifestyle choices. The more that lifestyles are equalized, the less personal responsibility there is among the citizens. Eventually, the government takes control of people’s lives to reduce costs. This article shows how it’s happening in Canada, as they try to ban trans fats:

A mammoth government program is a poor excuse for further encroachment on people’s lives–maybe fewer government entitlements would encourage smarter and healthier habits. If the ban is the sword of the nanny-state crusader, surely the health-care system represents his shield.

Freedom means deciding how much security to want, based on your own free choices and the risks you assume.

A useful podcast on health care and government, featuring Sally C. Pipes on the Dennis Prager show is here. For a good explanation of supply, demand and shortages, see this Von Mises Institute article.

UPDATE: Saw this UK Telegraph story on a single NHS hospital (H/T Stop the ACLU):

NHS managers were yesterday accused of putting targets and cost-cutting ahead of patients as a report into at Mid-Staffordshire Hospitals trust found up to 1,200 people may have died needlessly due to “appalling standards of care” at a single hospital.

…Last night patient groups voiced concern that managers who should have spotted failings at the trust but did not raise the alarm have been promoted to key jobs in the NHS and health care regulation.

…The investigation into care between 2005 and 2008 found overstretched and poorly trained nurses who turned off equipment because they did not know how to work it, newly qualified doctors left to care for patients recovering from surgery at night, patients left for hours in soiled bedclothes and reception staff expected to judge the seriousness of the condition of patients arriving at Accident and Emergency.

Doctors were diverted from seriously ill patients to treat ones with minor problems to make the trust look better because it was in danger of breaching the Government’s four-hour waiting time target.

Commentary

Why Obama’s big government socialism leads to secularism

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I have been browsing on a few forums, including forums that discuss Christian apologetics. Imagine my surprise when I encountered pro-Obama, pro-socialism statements by people who are supposed to be informed about these issues.

Well, I found an article over at Mercator Net, (an Australian web site), which might be useful for Christians who are sympathetic with Obama’s pacifism, redistribution of wealth and creeping fascism. I want to argue that his policies are inconsistent with Christianity.

First of all, the article notes that Obama did gain a significant number of votes  from religious Christians.

In 2008, according to CNN exit polls, Obama won forty-three percent of the presidential vote among voters who attend religious services once a week or more, up from Senator John Kerry’s thirty-nine percent in 2004. Obama did especially well with Black and Latino believers. But he also made real inroads among traditional white Catholics, according to a recent article by John Green in First Things.

The article describes Obama’s spending, (which I discussed here), and then comments on the significance of that spending for religious institutions, like churches and charities.

To fund his bold efforts to revive the American economy and expand the welfare state, Obama is proposing to spend a staggering $3.6 trillion in the 2010 fiscal year. Obama’s revolutionary agenda would push federal, state, and local spending to approximately 40 percent of Gross Domestic Product, up from about 33 percent in 2000. It would also put the size of government in the United States within reach of Europe, where government spending currently makes up 46 percent of GDP.

Why is this significant for the vitality of religion in America? A recent study of 33 countries around the world by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde, political scientists at the University of Washington, indicates that there is an inverse relationship between state welfare spending and religiosity. Specifically, they found that countries with larger welfare states had markedly lower levels of religious attendance, had higher rates of citizens indicating no religious affiliation whatsoever, and their people took less comfort in religion in general. In their words, “Countries with higher levels of per capita welfare have a proclivity for less religious participation and tend to have higher percentages of non-religious individuals.”

The article goes on to explain the chain of casusation from big government to secularization. Read the whole thing.

But this should be no surprise when you recall Nobel prize winning economist F. A. Hayek’s thesis in his landmark book “The Road to Serfdom”. His thesis is that the natural endpoint to all systems of government that control the means of production is fascism.

Fascism is a left-wing ideology, in which the state substitutes its own values, meanings and purposes for the values, meanings and purposes of individuals. There is no such thing as fascism on the right, because people on the right are free market capitalists who prefer small government and individual liberty.

To see how fascism destroys individual liberty and freedom of conscience, consider:

  • Obama’s plan to force hospital workers to perform abortions against their conscience
  • Obama’s forcing of taxpayers to pay for abortions here and abroad against their conscience
  • Obama’s forcing of taxpayers to pay for embryonic stem cell research against their conscience
  • Obama’s forcing of students to attend government run schools instead of private schools of their choice
  • Obama’s discrimination against religious schools in his spendulus bill
  • Obama’s plan to force some workers to join unions against their will and fun left-wing union political activism against their will
  • Obama’s forcing individuals to let Washington run their health-care

I could go on. And on. And on and on and on. But the point is that electing a socialist put us on the road to fascism. As IBD notes, socialists want to force-feed (podcast audio) their worldview onto an unwilling populace by any means – from government-run schools to news media.

I think that Christians need to do a much better job of understanding how our religious liberty hangs on small government and the free market. And remember: this crisis that Obama is “fixing”: it’s the Democrats who caused it, while Republicans tried to stop it.