Almost 20 years ago I remember
reading a news story about former Gov. Mike
Foster appointing an untested young guy not long out of Oxford as
Louisiana’s health secretary. I wondered who this guy Bobby
Jindal was to get such an important gig. Foster gushed with such praise
about him that it seemed he had come to save the state.
Now as Jindal prepares to leave the
Governor’s Mansion, through his tenure in that job, as head of today’s
University of Louisiana System, and as governor, the state still needs saving
from lots of things that only will multiply with his successor. But he made
progress, and well before I retire from academia scholars will consider him one
of the five most consequential governors in the state’s history.
Academicians holding the political
beliefs they do, most will pan his policies, but they will be unable to dismiss
his impact, one that at its heart abnegates what they typically support programmatically.
The similarly-situated mainstream media, when the occasion rises to discuss
his legacy, will find themselves in the same boat. Jindal’s tenure, best
understood in context, marks the decisive turn that eventually frees the
state’s political culture from its populist ethos.
Since the advent of Huey
Long, no governor prior to him strayed far from the consensus that the
state existed to spend money on things. While easy to trace the Democrats that
followed Long to this heritage, even the few Republicans before Jindal
acquiesced to the populism once irretrievably ingrained into the political
culture. With the partial exception of former Gov. Buddy
Roemer, who at first rebelled against this belief but all too quickly
surrendered to it, all did not challenge the notion that government should
collect goodies to divide them up; only that different partisans decided
different constituencies should get the largesse.
Jindal rejected this formulation,
preferring to conceptualize government spending on the basis not of paying off
an in-group, but on the basis of whether government should fund a task that
otherwise something outside of government should do; if so, at what expenditure
level with that level determined by a calculation of shared responsibility
designed to promote the good of that individual receiving the gift and relative
to the larger collective of individuals. As a corollary, and perhaps heightened
by his technocratic nature bereft of flamboyance, he demanded efficient use of
taxpayer dollars ahead of less efficiency tied to the benefit of certain
interests.
Government became smaller and
worked smarter in his eight years. Sometimes that came by plan, as in moving
Medicaid from a fee-for-service to managed capitation model or by expansion of
school choice. Sometimes, it seemed more in the breach, as in bringing in
nongovernment operators for most of the state’s public hospitals due to severe
federal government grant cuts or to save public dollars by increasing tuition
for higher education while reducing its taxpayer subsidy to rebalance that
sector’s funding in a way that mirrored the proportions typically seen in other
states.
He did wander into populist
treatments from time to time, such as expressing belief in occasional use of
shock theory economically by giving grants to private sector concerns to boost
job creation that did not appear cost effective. And he did not go far enough
in reducing expenditures for a state
that ranks 10th in state and local government spending per capita.
Of course, this failure leaves an
important unanswered question: did he not achieve more because of too much
resistance from policy-makers wedded to the populist political culture that
demands higher spending or because of insufficient commitment on his part? Plenty
of evidence from the mouths of legislators, even ones who otherwise hold
themselves out as conservatives, exists to assert the former reason, but that his
running for president may have encouraged him to downplay slashing government
further both to prevent displeasing certain constituencies helpful in that
quest and to avoid getting tarred with a perception, which undoubtedly would
have echoed through the liberal mainstream media, of callousness and
indifference plays to the latter explanation. Or both; these are not mutually
exclusive.
What is clear is that he has set
Louisiana government on an inexorable path to shaking off populism. Even as his
successor clearly comes from that lineage, unless Gov.-elect John Bel Edwards
does a complete about-face from his legislative career, his coming time in
office seems more a step backwards now that will set up advancement of two
steps in years to come. Edwards cannot bring state hospitals back under state
operation; he may try to limit but cannot destroy school choice options that
make Louisiana a national leader in this regard; he cannot return to the
imbalanced funding structure for higher education that once had the state among
the top
ten in the country in per capita
spending on higher education simply because political spending demands
continue to escalate while revenue production falters. He just cannot undo what
Jindal did.
Only by increasing directly-levied
taxes can Edwards save the populist model, and that guarantees him a single
term in office before replacement by a conservative Republican ready to finish
the transformation that Jindal launched. It’s tempting to wonder whether
Jindal, consciously or not, understood this: as long as he found enough funding
to keep a certain level of spending going without raising taxes, his successor
either would feel compelled to continue the high and unsustainable rate of
spending by raising taxes that would cause that governor’s political demise and
a backlash that would lead to lower future spending or would accept a role in
dismantling current government that is too big. Either way, Jindal’s revolution
wins.
Louisiana’s history of inordinate
taxation of producers relative to consumers and of government giving primacy to
channeling funds to special interests has produced decades of both relatively
low economic and population growth. This worldview’s inadequacy becomes more
apparent with each passing year, and the pressure for its permanent rejection,
if not already, in the near future will become unbearable. Populists of both
parties will convert or will get driven out of office and replaced by those
willing to stick the primer cord that Jindal lit into the explosives that blow
up the present tolerance for the laws, regulations, and behavior that permits
inefficient, big-spending state government.
Murphy
Foster put into place a parochial regime that restricted political
participation to favor elite interests. John
Parker started to dismantle that system (except as it related to blacks)
while Huey Long finished the job but replaced it with the warped,
government-centric populism still existing today if diluted. Prisoner
#03128-095 reinforced the populist coalition when its economic component
began to fade as society changed. Jindal attacked populism at its roots to
launch the beginning of its end, something some future chief executive will
finish off before I retire from academia, even if not within the next four
years.
That’s Jindal’s legacy. That’s why
he’s important.
No comments:
Post a Comment