Tom Baxter

There has recently been a dust-up over in Alabama which might have set our ears to ringing here in Georgia, had our ears not already been deafened by the clamor from Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Residential and commercial customers in Alabama pay more for their electricity than those in Georgia, even though the price of the fuel needed to produce the electricity is less there than it is here. According to a recent survey, Alabama Power customers paid $1.5 billion more over a six-year period than they would have if they could have bought the electricity from Georgia Power, even though both companies are owned by Southern Co.

And even though vast reserves of natural gas have been discovered in Alabama while Georgia is still prospecting for its first big strike, customers of the two largest natural gas utilities there are charged two to three times more in operations and maintenance costs than customers in Georgia or Mississippi.
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Stories about the Republican governors’ struggle with accepting the Medicaid expansion often say, as an Associated Press story did this week, that under the Affordable Care Act, “Washington pays the full cost of the expansion for the first three years, gradually phasing down to 90 percent.” This is true, but there is a little more to it, and in political terms that little is large.

To expand the explanation somewhat, from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2016, the feds will pay the participating states 100 percent of their Medicaid costs. The scale-down begins in 2017 and reaches 90 percent in 2020.

What results from this is somewhat akin to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. To some GOP governors who have been vocally opposed to Obamacare, the train they’re on appears to be moving slowly enough to get through one more qualifying, one more election, maybe even having their portrait hung in the capitol before they’re compelled to concede.
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It’s only fitting the first annual Lovebug Award for Congressional Cooperation should go to the representative of a Gulf Coast district familiar with those pesky winged insects which show up a couple of times a year to sacrifice themselves on the windshields of automobiles.

Rep. Steven Palazzo of Biloxi was one of 67 Republicans who voted Friday against a $9.7 billion relief bill for the part of the country hit by Superstorm Sandy. He was joined by five members of the Georgia delegation – Paul Broun, Doug Collins, Tom Graves, Tom Price and Rob Woodall – as well as representatives from several other states which have been recent recipients of federal disaster aid. But the prize for sheer glass-house, pot-call-the kettle-black brass has to go to Palazzo, who represents the district where Hurricane Katrina hit land, in the heart of a region where rent-seeking isn’t a dusty economic term but a way of life. Continue reading →