Landry finally defeats "baantjies vir boeties"

Last week, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry completed the inevitable defeat of baantjies vir boeties, making a bad but unfortunately necessary policy less obnoxious while telling special interests and courthouse gangs to go pound sand.

Baantjies vir boeties – “jobs for the boys” – was an expression heard in the old Republic of South Africa during the reign of the National Party up until majority rule came about in 1994. The instituters of apartheid pursued this strategy to keep white support from erosion by moderate-to-radical competitors focusing on economic class concerns that could distract from its racial politics message, doing so through heavy government regulation and spending to provide employment in both the public and private sectors. (Many other polities had ruling regimes that promised the same, but the old RSA example was the starkest in its brazenness.)

The same tactic, in the same sense that it was to use government power to reward supporters with jobs and other concessions, Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards foisted upon Louisiana when he stipulated changes to the Industrial Tax Exemption Program. This procedure had allowed a new concern a partial-to-total break from property taxes for up to a decade. The state’s Board of Commerce and Industry – mostly gubernatorial appointees and the rest being elected or appointed officials including a designee of the governor – rules on these with the governor having a veto power. Thus, a governor basically can dictate the parameters by which breaks are given.

Edwards used that power to limit the break to 80 percent maximum and split the decade into two five-year terms. These impaired the ability of ITEP, as inefficient a fiscal mechanism as it is, to repair to a degree Louisiana’s outrageously high property tax rates on everything but primary residences, and even on inventory.

But much more damaging was his insistence on giving local taxing entities a veto power over awarding of the exemption. This allowed them to strike deals, both formal and informal, with petitioners that defeated the purpose of ITEP as an economic development tool. Most grossly, jobs requirements could be demanded out of companies, with some jurisdictions creating a checklist of intricate requirements that satisfied political demands more than they peripherally if at all boosted development. Indeed, Edwards would incorporate a jobs requirement into the parameters.

Fortunately, Landry began changing this not long after he succeeded Edwards. He scrapped both the jobs and local approval requirements, but this applied only to new applicants. He completed the task last week when his latest executive order dealing with ITEP eliminated retroactive applications of the jobs requirement. Along with that, the order allows on an extraordinary basis the exemption to go all the way up to 100 percent for projects of at least a half-billion bucks in size.

These changes put ITEP back almost to where it was before Edwards began warping it. Ideally, it shouldn’t be needed by having a much lower homestead exemption and overall reduction in property taxes across parishes, but that’s not part of fiscal reform to be put to the electorate’s test this upcoming weekend, so it must be tolerated. And with this final flourish, Landry defeats the courthouse gangs and special interests that supported Edwards who used the previous policy to reward their clients rather than boost quality of life for all.