Session did little good, but avoided disaster

It wasn’t a very helpful regular session of the Louisiana Legislature, but it could have been worse.

Reformers had high hopes that the one-time state revenue bonus courtesy of Washington Democrats’ debt binge – even as it brought the highest price inflation in four decades that drives up the cost of government – could be managed in a way that curbed the state’s addiction to spending that has increased two-thirds faster inflation adjusted that state-generated revenue intake during the terms of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards. They hoped to bank hundreds of millions of dollars and pay down the same in liabilities before a forecast $1.5 billion in state revenue declination over the next three years came to pass.

Unfortunately, they only succeeded partially. While some of the surplus did go to reduce unfunded accrued liabilities, freeing up funds for state and local agencies, more was spent on recurring and nonrecurring commitments. This was made possible by raising the state’s spending cap by $250 million this current year, with another $1.4 billion rise on the books for the impending one, not leaving much for when the well starts running dry over the next year.

Worse, hundreds of millions of dollars of that ended up funding local pork, and disproportionately favoring Democrats despite Republicans having supermajorities in each chamber. That’s because projects for fiscally conservative Republicans disproportionately were yanked in retaliation for their not supporting busting the spending cap.

Fiscal conservativism did catch a break when pay raises for education employees ended up in the form of a stipend rather than permanent state-backed increase totaling nearly $200 million. This means next year possibly they can use funds, as they had intended this year, to pay down the UAL more and let local governments pick up the tab for the raises on an ongoing basis. They also managed to cut $100 million in Department of Health funding excluding waiver programs for people with disabilities, which won’t be missed from its $4.5 billion in spending that consumes nearly one in three state-generated dollars. Given that the Edwards Administration has created policies dramatically reducing waiver service provision and planned to spend all outdoors on keeping as many Medicaid recipients from being disenrolled as possible, unspent money on waiver services and reducing spending on enrollment maintenance down to the level most states have pursued will leave more than enough to offset the “cut.”

Also, minor tax relief is forthcoming with a pair of bills reducing the corporate franchise and Quality Jobs Program that provide a net gain for consumers. However, the entirely wasteful subsidization of film and television production was granted new life through 2031 at a net cost of around $100 million pried out of taxpayers’ pockets annually. And, just as with education salaries adjustments to which should be paid instead by local taxpayers, state taxpayers also unwisely got put on the hook for boosted salary supplements for local public safety agencies.

Victories also came with bills passing with bipartisan support offering protection of children from dangerous medical interventions and preventing local governments from interfering with parental and teacher rights, although the ideologue Edwards has threatened to veto these. Yet legislators frittered away opportunities to reduce needless bureaucracy imposed on carrying concealed handguns, to provide greater opportunities for children to receive better education by allowing families the chance to choose what school in which to enroll them and egregiously stalled a program to aid in doing this for children with disabilities, and blew chances to strengthen public safety with various bills that would have tried selectively seventeen year-olds as adults (who comprise the most rapidly-growing amount of violent criminals), raised penalties for certain violent crimes, and imposed minimum bail conditions for those kinds of crimes.

Given the majority of voters’ preferences and the depopulation/low economic growth/high criminal activity conditions that plague Louisiana, particularly in contrast to its southern regional neighbors, the session’s failure to address these adequately made it turn out disappointingly, but at least it wasn’t a complete disaster.