It’s legacy-salvaging time as the embers die on the Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration, with a full-bore effort to turn impossibly a sow’s ear into a silk purse.
At the specific policy level, for example, you have its Commissioner of Administration trying to stave off the undoing by incoming governor Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry of a costly and counterproductive taxpayer-funded parental leave scheme for state employees while proclaiming “History is going to look very favorably on … Edwards and what he’s done.” This shilling is backed more broadly by a propaganda campaign using tax dollars touting alleged accomplishments, if not reframing failures.
Dardenne is dead wrong: if history is kind, it will relegate the Edwards years as a footnote; if bluntly realistic, it will register the 2016-23 period as one where his policies botched economic growth and development and coarsened society while privileging special interests at the expense of Louisianans – all in all, a retreat into the past following an agenda that disserved the state for decades. The data leave no other assessment possible.
While Landry has yet to take office, already he has signaled he will undo as much as he can of what Edwards inflicted. There is not much of what Edwards did which can’t be reversed in its entirety, but, unfortunately, where he did the most damage are things that will be the hardest to contain.
Most egregiously, he grew government at an alarming rate, much higher than inflation. From the total spending by the state from six months into his first term through what is budgeted through the six months after his second term ends, total state spending will rise 91 percent. Some of this was driven by bad choices that force fed federal dollars into the state (which now comprise just over half of budgeted spending), but even from state sources general fund spending will rise 36 percent in the period while statutory dedications will rise 72 percent and self-generated dollars will rise 50 percent. For all 50 states, the fiscal year 2016 to FY 2022 increase was only 59 percent. Meanwhile, inflation increased only 28 percent in the period through last month.
This spending orgy particularly was egged on by expanding Medicaid at the start of FY 2017. It now costs Louisianans over $450 million extra a year in state funds (using FY 2021 figures; this will rocket higher because of Wuhan coronavirus pandemic policies for the next couple of years which fortunately since have been discontinued), redistributing wealth to eligible enrollees anywhere from a third to a half of whom already had health insurance and providing a benefit that discourages work. And not that it seems to have done much relative to other states, as its 2017 rank is the same as its 2023 rank for public health according to U.S. News and World Report, 45th, while United Health Care’s America’s Health Rankings annual report for 2017 and 2022 shows the state slipped – from next from dead last to dead last.
Meanwhile, spurred by this ballooning of government, the state began falling behind, if not retreating, economically. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated, and is the most prominent legacy of Edwards’ policies, than in the depopulation of the Louisiana from the middle of 2016 through mid-2022. While the nation grew 3.2 percent and the state’s southern neighbors experienced a 5.2 percent increase in residents, Louisiana lost 1.9 percent or 88,000 people as they left seeking better opportunity, if not better-run government.
Naturally enough, because of the state’s relatively poor economic performance. A lower proportion of able-bodied adults younger than age 65 worked in last month, 59 percent, as opposed to when Edwards’ first budget kicked in in Jul., 2016, then at 60.2 percent, with this latest figure seventh-lowest in the nation (and only as high as it is because of the state’s depopulation). Contrast this with the national rate of 62.7 percent. And the state’s rate is only as high as it is because of depopulation and aggregate job loss; since Jul., 2016 the state actually has lost (preliminary Oct., 2023 estimate, seasonally adjusted) 6,000 jobs.
For those who did work, the Edwards’ years have been marked by falling behind. While personal per capita income grew 39 percent from mid-2016 through last month nationally, and in the southeast 40.7 percent, it grew just 35.6 percent in Louisiana. In compound annual terms, the 4.6 percent growth rate ranked 35th among the states.
Regrettably, it will take time to unwind the massive growth in government and effort to find ways to curtail Medicaid expansion, unless it is eliminated which may be difficult politically to do with a critical mass of individuals now hooked on redistribution of wealth to them. Perhaps the only other consequential policy change – again, with an overall negative impact – Edwards foisted was his criminal justice changes designed to incarcerate fewer individuals that supposedly would save money.
People incarcerated since the end of 2016 through Sept., 2023 have fallen around a fifth although by only about a thousand in state prisons. Yet this was less than the over quarter decline in all states (through 2021, the latest available data) And claims that the changes, designed to send fewer people to prison, caused this decline are tempered by demographic changes with the proportion of younger individuals falling (younger males disproportionately commit crime) in this period. Nor was much money saved, since the charge to house state prisoners in local jails increased.
Worse, despite these changes violent crime increased in Louisiana from 2016-22, some 11 percent. Meanwhile, violent crime across the U.S. barely budged, up about a percent making it just 54 percent as high as Louisiana’s. This lends credence to charges by Landry and many others that the changes came at a cost of safety, and portends they will intensify efforts over the past couple of years to clamp down that didn’t make it into law because of Edwards’ vetoes.
Finally, perhaps the most insidious and tragic impact Edwards had concerned his pandemic policy, which employed stricter measures than in many states and, which research has demonstrated, largely were useless in combatting viral spread and suffering, but ending up induced misery in other ways. In fact, running the numbers shows that Edwards’ lockdown policies cost more lives than they saved and certainly did more damage to the economy and civil society (not to mention the state Constitution) than did far less heavy-handed responses from other states’ governors who had access to the very same data but who made wiser decisions.
Unquestionably, overall Edwards – aided by too few legislative Republicans doing too little to counter him, although things would have been worse had they not at least resisted his more egregious efforts to raise taxes, to spend more, and to regulate more heavily – has produced a reign of error that left the state and its people in relatively worse condition than when he took over, if not absolutely worse in terms of residents, jobs, and lives lost. No length to which public relations campaigns will go or amount of lackeys trying to deflect from their own culpability in disserving the public can change that fact.
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