Louisiana is screwed. The second poorest state in the country has a $3 billion deficit, and no one is going to do anything about it, apparently. They’re in a race to become the poorest state, which will of course lock in all the citizens to the Republican party as they proceed to become more ignorant and angry about their condition, so it’s a political win for the Idiot Party in America.
Who’s to blame? You can guess.
Many of the state’s economic analysts say a structural budget deficit emerged and then grew under former governor Bobby Jindal, who, during his eight years in office, reduced the state’s revenue by offering tax breaks to the middle class and wealthy. He also created new subsidies that aim to lure and keep businesses. Those policies, state data shows, didn’t deliver their hoped-for economic growth. This year, Louisiana has doled out $210 million more to corporations in the form of credits and subsidies than it has collected from them in taxes.
Can’t we just get “LOSER” tattooed on the heads of these bad Republicans? Instead, you know he’s going to pop up every four years in a forlorn run for the presidency, because Republicans always fail upwards.
Now compare Louisiana to Minnesota, my state, where we’ve had a governor who has been doing all that stuff the liberals talk about.
When he took office in January of 2011, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton inherited a $6.2 billion budget deficit and a 7 percent unemployment rate from his predecessor, Tim Pawlenty, the soon-forgotten Republican candidate for the presidency who called himself Minnesota’s first true fiscally-conservative governor in modern history. Pawlenty prided himself on never raising state taxes — the most he ever did to generate new revenue was increase the tax on cigarettes by 75 cents a pack. Between 2003 and late 2010, when Pawlenty was at the head of Minnesota’s state government, he managed to add only 6,200 more jobs.
During his first four years in office, Gov. Dayton raised the state income tax from 7.85 to 9.85 percent on individuals earning over $150,000, and on couples earning over $250,000 when filing jointly — a tax increase of $2.1 billion. He’s also agreed to raise Minnesota’s minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2018, and passed a state law guaranteeing equal pay for women. Republicans like state representative Mark Uglem warned against Gov. Dayton’s tax increases, saying, “The job creators, the big corporations, the small corporations, they will leave. It’s all dollars and sense to them.”
The thing is…it worked.
Between 2011 and 2015, Gov. Dayton added 172,000 new jobs to Minnesota’s economy — that’s 165,800 more jobs in Dayton’s first term than Pawlenty added in both of his terms combined. Even though Minnesota’s top income tax rate is the fourth highest in the country, it has the fifth lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.6 percent. According to 2012-2013 U.S. census figures, Minnesotans had a median income that was $10,000 larger than the U.S. average, and their median income is still $8,000 more than the U.S. average today.
By late 2013, Minnesota’s private sector job growth exceeded pre-recession levels, and the state’s economy was the fifth fastest-growing in the United States. Forbes even ranked Minnesota the ninth best state for business (Scott Walker’s “Open For Business” Wisconsin came in at a distant #32 on the same list). Despite the fearmongering over businesses fleeing from Dayton’s tax cuts, 6,230 more Minnesotans filed in the top income tax bracket in 2013, just one year after Dayton’s tax increases went through. As of January 2015, Minnesota has a $1 billion budget surplus, and Gov. Dayton has pledged to reinvest more than one third of that money into public schools. And according to Gallup, Minnesota’s economic confidence is higher than any other state.
How can anyone take Jindal seriously any more?
More than just the example of Jindal, how does anyone still think that providing tax cuts for the rich improves revenues, even in the short term? And in the long-term, nothing does better than investing in education.
Jindal’s presidential slogan was: “Rested, Tanned, Ready”. I rest my case on Mr Jindal.
Governor Dayton is reinvesting money in public schools. Meanwhile, thanks to Jindal, Louisiana’s public schools may have to close in April because there’s not enough money to keep them open until June, when the school year normally ends. There’s not enough money to run summer school programs. Public Universities may have to close their doors. Even football programs are threatened. Healthcare for disabled children is threatened.
On their on big selling point, financial probity, Republicans consistently fail. For another example, see Governor Brownback in Kansas, or Rick Snyder in Michigan.
Donald Trump is clearly in the same camp as Jindal, Snyder and Brownback.
Trump has his own 47% attitudes. He continues to criticize Mitt Romney for the “47%” speech, but I don’t see how that is different from what Trump says. In June 2015, Trump said:
Mother Jones link.
The quoted text is from a Fox News interview. The comment is cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness Thread.
Maddow did a good segment on this:
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/gop-failures-set-backdrop-for-next-primaries-636740675886
I don’t really doubt Minnesota is doing better than the nation as a whole, but comparing the median to the average isn’t the best way to do it.
Q: “How can anyone take Jindal seriously any more?”
A: By having zero interest in actual data, forming a political stance derived wholly from ideology.
Maybe tax breaks for corporations could be tied to actual job creation. Yes, we will give you a tax break on the condition that you actually create X number of jobs, and if you fail to do so, your taxes will retroactively go back up to where they would have been without the tax break. That at least would make some economic sense.
It’s an open contest as to who is and was worse among the GOP governors: Jindal, Brownback, or Snyder. Jindal probably did the most damage, but Snyder’s damage is particularly repulsive.
This is just hilarious. I guarantee you that virtually nobody is going to leave Minnesota just because of a 2% absolute increase in the top state income tax bracket. Of course, folks have been saying the same thing to Brownback in Kansas, but he’s as delusional as ever.
How can the republicans possibly claim to like small government and reduced spending when they consistently favor spending more on the military?
It beggars the imagination when someone puts “fiscal conservative” in the same platform as “engage in foreign wars and police actions”
It is a race to see which GOP governor can wreck their state the most.
Jindal of Louisiana is ahead right now.
Brownback of Kansas is challenging him for first place.
Scott Walker of Wisconsin is making a strong move.
From the outside and from a safe distance away of 1500 miles, these states look like embryonic dystopias.
Half of all state budgets are for education i.e. children. The damage is cumulative and won’t really show up for many years. Until children today can’t fill out a job application because…they can’t read it.
Further to Lynna, OM #3 (MassMomentumEnergy’s Maddow link also mentions early closure of schools)
To make matters even worse, what are parents (and their employers) supposed to do when kids are out of school weeks or months more than they were expecting?
The two lies of the GOP are that they are fiscally conservative and pro family.
The two periods where the national debt ballooned were Reagan and Bush. And their pro-family policies always end up meaning pro-rich old white men.
Bobby Jindal, putting the lousy in Louisiana.
I wonder how much the universities could save by cancelling football. The once-impossible might well become the inevitable.
I’m with raven #11; don’t overlook Scottie Walker.
Things are gonna get so bad in LA, I’m not even sure their schools are going to churn out graduates with skills enough to even ask “You want fries with that?”.
The GOP saves the government money in the same way the guy with a new car saves money by not changing his oil. Democrats on the other hand save money like the person who maintains their car, fixes it when it breaks down, and doesn’t abuse the car. In other words, they invest in their people, help them up when things go wrong, and work towards lifting them out of poverty and into the middle class where possible.
The GOP hasn’t figured this out. Poor people tend to be expensive for a society, at least for a society that tries to provide any form of safety net. They rely more often on external support (medical care, food stamps, housing). But if you invest in them with better education and provide opportunities, many of them become not poor. As not poor citizens, they contribute to the tax base and pay their own way in terms of medical care and self sustainment (food, housing). They also tend to not create more poor people, as their children have access to better schools and opportunities. As a result, the need for more government support reduces over time.
GOP members often seems to pride themselves as being the party of Lincoln. If Lincoln was alive today, I think he’d be appalled at what the GOP has become.
They lie? Their idea of small government is one that fits in your bedroom or a woman’s womb.
Oh, they’ve figured it out all right. They just think the solution is to get rid of those expensive safety nets.
Let’s not forget Christie. When I read (forget where) what Jindal had done to Louisiana you could almost have done a search and replace with Jindal -> Christi and Louisiana -> New Jersey
C’mon, folks – no listing of current awful governors could be complete without Texas’s Greg Abbott, Maine’s Paul LePage, & Florida’s Rick Scott – and Kentucky’s Matt Bevin, a late starter, shows real talent in this competition.
By comparison, Sarah Palin’s half-term in Alaska looks positively positive.
Is there a (current or “recent”) thug governor who isn’t awful?
Ah yes, Bobby “We don’t need a volcano monitoring service” Jindal.
@6: “average” is a catch all term. It can mean “median”, “mean”, or “geometric mean”, depending on context. In this case, since income averages are almost invariably reported as medians, it probably means “median”, not “mean”, so that the numbers are truly comparable. (In any event, since income means over large populations are invariably higher than medians (since the bottom of the distribution is constrained), comparing MN median to US mean would put MN in an even more favorable light.
@24: Sorry, my bad: the US mean would be artificially higher. But my main point is that both figures are probably medians.
Just think how well the state would be doing if they hadn’t given $500M to the Minnesota Vikings.
Bobby Jindal went to an Ivy League school. He knows words. He has the best words.
for the life of me I do not understand how they can continue to advocate the same policies of tax cuts and spending cuts on the basic elements of government like education, infrastructure disaster preparedness and basic administration while increasing things spending on jails and continue to get the all the negative results so plainly indicated by the data of unemployment and debt.
uncle frogy
See, you’re failing to appreciate the genius of the Republican strategy. Jindal can claim that his policies succeeded because the state would be in much worse shape without everything he’d done. Conservatives will eat it up without question.
Jindel has poisoned education in Louisiana in at least two different ways. Besides cutting funds for education, he had also assisted in opening the doors wide for teaching creationism in that state. And of course who can forget his work as an exorcist. Is there anything that Jindel likes that isn’t totally insane?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Science_Education_Act
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/25/a-presidential-candidate-first-jindals-witness-to-an-apparent-exorcism/
“Jindel” is actually “Jindal”, and he is poison either way.
In Kansas Republicans are rewriting the rules regarding the impeachment of judges right now. The judiciary in Kansas has been attempting to hold the GOP to the letter of the law regarding funding for education. Unable to stop the judiciary from their “activist” stance regarding following the Kansas Constitution, the GOP-controlled Senate is planning a bill that would make “attempting to usurp the power” of the Legislature or the executive branch grounds for impeachment.
I think this will be a great start for them. They should really try this approach on a national scale.
I assume that once they can get rid of all the uncooperative judges who are trying to uphold the Constitution, they will install right wing judges who will toe the Party line. Then, without the protection of the judiciary, they can pass laws making it illegal to dispute the Republican agenda.
They can basically abolish the legislature next and install all Right Wing lawmakers. Then our Republican government can just appoint whoever they want to each and every position in the government, sealing their position of power against all left wing, liberal ideologues.
Once the opposition is quashed, big business will be free to work in lock step with our Right Wing leaders and form a perfect relationship where the government and big business can meld into one, giant, successful enterprise without the hindrance of opposing views.
They could call it National Socialism.
They can basically abolish the legislature next and install all Right Wing lawmakers. Then our Republican government can just appoint whoever they want to each and every position in the government, sealing our position of power against all left wing, liberal ideologues.
Once the opposition is quashed, big business will be free to work in lock step with our Right Wing leaders and form a perfect relationship where the government and big business can meld into one, giant, successful enterprise without the hindrance of opposing views.
We could call it National Socialism.
Disgraceful mismanagement. That or criminal negligence. Or maybe even criminal malevolence. Bobby sure wouldn’t be the first stooge to bankrupt a government for his own or someone else’s benefit. Maybe fucking up Louisiana was part of an extended job interview: “Okay, we’ll give you a state – wring the bastard thing dry as fast as you can and we’ll see what we can do about a spot in DC. State? Defence? You like choppers, Bobby?”
Anyway, general wonderment: why the hell do people STILL think arch-conservatives are good with money? Ideology to one side, the numbers simply don’t lie – actually, now I think of it, keeping people uneducated and underemployed is very likely how they’ve retained that reputation. If you don’t understand numbers at even a basic level, you won’t be able to see, accurate to two decimal places, just how you’re being screwed by the very people who’ve convinced you that they are your only hope. Works down here.
(mild tangent)
In fact, the ideological lockstep with the local Australian brand of megaconservatism is palpable. Our arch-Tories, the evermore ironically-named “Liberal Party” – have been slowly infiltrated by fundamentalist wowsers intent on enforcing their anti-science Puritanism and their one-sided austerity at the state and federal level. They’ve always been the party of rigid authoritarianism, class boundaries and social inertia/regress, but since PM Howard’s tryst with the US neo-cons from 2001 onward, our local conservatives have started to ape the rampaging success of far-right weaponised idiocy, as exemplified by the Republican/Religious Right coalition and the strange phenomenon of GOP presidential hopefuls in a literal and public dick-measuring content. They’ve become more blatant in their mission to destroy the CSIRO, hobble renewable energy, gut education (or price it out of range of everyone but the upper middle), shred health, demonise non-white foreigners in the name of security, carve out more pie for the CEO-classes, punish the poor, ignore the Indigenous, pander to racists and stamp out unions. Not that they have ever been that subtle about their intentions (especially since the reforms of Labor PM Whitlam), but lately they may as well be wearing capes and monologuing dramatically as thunder crashes outside. Many of their frontbenchers are also openly hostile to LGBT people, happily going on public record with their musty histrionics about slippery slopes to bestiality and social decay (as evidenced literally nowhere that has achieved marriage equality, ever). Excluding the rampant ammosexuality of their US cousins, it’s a parallel almost close enough to be perfect. The unofficial but obvious alliance with Australia’s foremost group of moaning, mewling, misanthropic little fucking wowsers, the Australian Christian Lobby, as well as evangelist groups like Access Ministries and Hillsong, is the sickly icing on it all.
@14 leftover1under
I’m pretty sure college sportsball is a money maker for the school.
the thing that I find really DUH! is the outrage and disgust that is coming from many of the established leaders in he republican party to Trump.
He is the direct result of their southern strategy and astroturf tea party and the race and class bating that they have been using for 50 years to gain political power. Flint is what happens when the people and government is the problem! as is Jindal’s results. I do not think it would be very hard to find similar results of highly polluted areas down in Louisiana maybe not lead but PVC, PCB’s or perchlorate’s maybe other hydro-carbons
uncle frogy
@ procyon #32 They could call it National Socialism.
Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism; at least it was an ethos.
unclefrogy @35: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
I guess it just goes to show that “trickle down” means “piss on you.”
By the way, Louisiana’s new Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, delivered a prime time address about the state’s precarious financial situation a month ago. It’s a good thing he exposed the situation early in his term. A month or two from now and Republicans will be blaming him for the situation. They probably will any way.
Writing for Think Progress, Carimah Townes pointed out that Jindal’s financial malfeasance will spell doomsday for the justice system in New Orleans. Never that great in the first place, justice is going to get a real slap down when there’s no more money to provide legal counsel to defendants who are poor.
A system that relies on fines and court fees is more open to corruption. There is an incentive to keep people paying fines, and to put them back in jail if they fail to pay monthly fees. Massachusetts has this problem too, as do other states.
Yeah, that last sentence highlights a problem so typical of Republican cost-saving measures. They save a dollar today that requires them to spend a hundred dollars tomorrow.
The next time someone says ‘job creator’ in public they need to be shouted down. Only customers create jobs, nobody else.
Rich people stimulate the economy the way a dam stimulates water flow.
multitool (#40)
That’s not true. Governments can and do create jobs in the public interest beyond customer need/desire. Look at the Works Progress Administration for a particularly obvious example.
No argument with this, though.
A. Noyd, it could be argued that in a sense the government is a customer (i.e. entity that spends resources in order to get some product) in these cases.
@Charly (#42)
Well, in a representative government, they’d be agents for the “customer.” And the actual “customer” would be the people of the country. Who are the workers. And if the people want jobs, then what’s the product exactly? Jobs? The public works generated by the jobs? That gets circular and nonsensical really fast. So while it may be arguable, it’s not really useful.
procyon@32 (rewriting impeachment rules for judges so its possible to impeach them for overturning laws), The current “government” of Poland is trying something similar: They recently passed a law interfering with how the Constitutional Court works, in effect making it much much harder for the court to overturn laws. The Court very recently (earlier this week?) overturned that law, with the “government” saying in advance of the ruling
There’s been other odious laws passed or proposed by the current Polish “government” affecting, e.g., press freedom. The EU is now getting involved, warning that the current Polish “government” is undermining the rule of law, among other things.
I myself have proposed that if you want an idea of what the USA could be like with teh trum-prat (especially), or indeed any of the thug klowns as President, look at the current situation in Poland — and add a massive nuclear-equipped military (plus considerable economic clout).