Jindal staff desperately, poorly try to justify bribery fund

The hastily-announced plans that the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration has for the Mega-Project Fund must be recognized as an exercise in political expediency to obscure the failure of the ideology behind its creation, and which is threatening to derail seriously the Administration itself.

This week in budget hearings prior to the regular legislative session the Jindal Administration outlined plans to spend around $260 million of this fund, created to bribe large employment initiatives to come to the state, on projects that were announced long ago and/or do not qualify under law to receive money from it. Of the four, the half which did qualify were supposed to be paid for by debt issuance, while the other pair (one of which goes to the firm of which a significant portion of ownership lays in the hands of a highly-speculated Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate against incumbent and fellow Republican Sen. David Vitter, the other a bailout of a failed poultry concern) would require the Legislature to alter the law to permit use of the fund for those purposes.

Why suddenly did minds change about debt issuance, even though the state ran a huge surplus from last year’s budget that could be spent on capital projects like this rather than through a non-debt issuance from the Fund, and in trying to squeeze in these non-qualifying projects? Because some justification of the fund’s existence had to be made given the Legislature’s interest in excising from the fund its bounty to use for other purposes since it never had been drawn upon in two years (and last year the Legislature did withdraw a relatively small amount of funds to pay for bonuses for education employees.)

It’s a crude gesture that the Legislature needs to brush aside with the understanding that the use of this money will not promote any genuine economic development in the state. It would be spent better on cushioning blows received in steep budget cuts to health care and higher education. This does not mean that either area or others in government must not eliminate low priority, non-essential activities, but at the same time it is a greater waste to let this money sit in the hopes of funding unproductive economic activities than to spend it on needed government functions.

It remains a mystery why Jindal is enthralled with the snake oil peddled by the likes of Department of Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret, who, like his predecessor, cannot understand that basic economics that tell us the way economic growth gets produced is by lowering the cost of doing business in the state, not by handing out money to do business in the state. It’s the difference between letting the marketplace, which gains its input from the wisdom derived from the decisions of millions, if not billions, of individuals interacting as part of it, and a handful of incredibly overpaid functionaries who think they are smarter than the market, make crucial decisions regarding taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars.

If Jindal cannot realize this on his own, the Legislature must help him do it. Whether it will is another matter, but it should be worrisome to Jindal that ideological opponents of his, who would love nothing more than to increase the size of government and its control over people’s lives, are skewering him on this issue, taking the ideological high road in wondering whether government ought to be in the business of chicken gutting (even as they approve federal government versions of what Jindal is countenancing, such as taking possession of automakers and insurers). This blind spot of Jindal’s threatens to do more harm to his ideas of remaking state government – or to any political career past that which he may envision – than he seems to realize.