With apologies for stealing and changing this line: OK, Landry, Nelson, Emerson, et. al. were right.
Last week, Louisiana’s Revenue Estimating Conference held its end-of-calendar-year meeting to revise numbers. These revisions can mean the state might have extra money from past budget years to spend on essentially one-time items, extra money for this budget year to spend on anything, and more to spend on the upcoming fiscal year 2027 budget – or it might be reversals in this year where forecasts could cause retrenchments and reduced future expenditures, respectively.
With almost a year of data from changes made during last year’s Third Extraordinary Session of the Legislature now on the books, many of the usual suspects from the collectivist political left then predicted at best “uncertainty,” at worst “budget shortfalls” as a result of flattening tax individual and corporate tax rates, broadening the base a little by excising some exemptions, increasing individual exemption levels, and increasing the sales tax rate. Howls of protest came about how this would prove to be regressive and hurt lowest-income people’s pocketbooks (although one analysis estimated it would cost a whopping $5 extra a year for such a household).
