From the editor: Catching up on elections
One of the challenges in print journalism at election time is finding the right time to put election coverage in the paper.
Many people wait until it’s nearly time to vote to take a look at the issues. Others get interested in races and debates months ahead of time.
And then there are the frequent requests to publish sample ballots. That’s not really practical anymore in a time of shrinking space and increasingly complex ballots.
Enter the internet, when even weeks-old stories can hang around for the moment when readers are ready. We’ve collected links to many of our stories and videos on one page at StMaryNow.com. Here’s a Tiny URL to help you find it.
https://tinyurl.com/ydhl7h5b
Early voting for the Nov. 6 primary started Tuesday morning and will run through Oct. 30, excluding Sunday. In St. Mary, you can vote at the courthouse in Franklin or the registrar’s branch office, 301 Third St. in Morgan City.
The stakes are high both nationally, where control of Congress is up for grabs, and locally, where we’ll elect a sheriff, school board members and municipal officials in Berwick, Morgan City and Patterson.
A dream costs $2 now
Lottery players once talked about a dollar and a dream. Now Powerball and Mega Millions lotto tickets cost $2. Inflation strikes even at our fantasies.
But at least there’s a big payoff, or more exactly, two big payoffs. The Mega Millions multistate lotto jackpot is at a record $1.6 billion. The Powerball jackpot is $620 million.
To help with your daydreaming, I looked up the jackpots on the USA Mega website, which estimates how much you actually get to take home if you win.
In Louisiana, the Mega Millions $1.6 billion jackpot is worth $642,479,000 in a lump sum payment after the feds and the state get their cut.
If you want your payments spread over 30 years, you start with $17.1 million in year one. The yearly payment grows to $70.4 million for year 30. The total after-tax payout would be more than $1.1 billion.
The Powerball jackpot is a lump sum payment of $251,553,000 in Louisiana, or 30 annuity payments ranging from $6.6 million to $27.3 million per year over 30 years. The total would be $440.2 million. Again, that’s according to USA Mega.
Good luck.
When Louisiana won the lottery
On Nov. 11, the world will remember the armistice that ended World War I 100 years ago. It’s a good time to remember how much events that happen thousands of miles away can affect our lives.
Another anniversary makes the point in a way that hits closer to home here in south Louisiana.
Forty-five years ago this month, Egyptian tanks and more than 100,000 soldiers rolled east toward the Suez Canal and, beyond that, toward Israel. This was the fourth and, in many ways, most frightening of the four Arab-Israeli wars that followed the Jewish state’s creation in 1948.
The Israelis were caught off guard by the Egyptians and by the Syrians who swept down through the Golan Heights. Still, Israel recovered quickly and had the Arab forces on the run by late October, when the Nixon-Kissinger shuttle diplomacy resulted in a ceasefire.
But the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries retaliated for Western support by imposing an oil embargo.
The price of oil, which was at $20 a barrel (adjusted for inflation) in summer 1973, shot up to $55 by January 1974.
If St. Mary people know anything, they know what happens with the price of oil fluctuates.
Six years later, after the Iranian revolution, the price jumped again, this time to $123.
This was Louisiana state government’s version of winning the lottery. Then-Gov. Edwin Edwards successfully changed the basis for oil severance taxes from a flat rate to a percentage of the price. Revenues, and spending, soared.
Five years ago, I dug up an old New York Times story that described Lafayette as one of the nation’s largest concentrations of millionaires. The story talked about young women wearing jewelry worth thousands of dollars to high school, and about private jet flights to Houston just for lunch.
The results in St. Mary were mixed, to look at population statistics. The parish’s population had grown from 35,000 in 1950 to 61,000 in 1970. But the population growth actually slowed in the 1970s.
The growth slowed and turned to shrinkage in the 1980s, when the price of oil dipped to $30.
There must be a hundred explanations for why.
Some say the Saudis were scared of our move toward energy conservation and wanted oil to be cheap so we'd keep being wasteful.
Patrick Taylor of Taylor Energy Co. and TOPS fame once said the Saudis crashed the price in order to steal market share from competing nations. Still others say the low oil prices were President Ronald Reagan’s secret plan to rob the old Soviet Union of its main source of foreign currency.
Whatever happened, bumper stickers that once said “Let them freeze in the dark” were replaced by “Will the last one out of Louisiana turn out the lights?”
We were on a roller coaster from which we’ve never managed to climb down.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.