It’s been decades since Louisiana had a political star noticed
on a national stage, and with the passage of one of the nation’s
most aggressive, landmark education reform packages this spring
Gov. Bobby Jindal has become just such a star. So much so that
Jindal’s name is one of several being mentioned
for vice president by multiple national pundits.
Jindal, a Republican, won re-election in last year’s statewide
cycle with an overwhelming 66 percent of the vote. His victory was
such a foregone conclusion that the Louisiana Democratic Party
could not find a credible challenger against him; the second place
finisher was Tara Hollis, a middle-school teacher from tiny
Haynesville who had never run for political office.
And the governor had some coattails. When the dust settled after
the 2011 statewide elections, Republicans controlled 58 seats in
the 105-member House of Representatives and 24 of the 39 seats in
the Senate — the first controlling majority for the GOP in
Louisiana since Reconstruction. In addition, the six other
statewide elected offices remained under Republican control, with
no serious Democrat challengers for any of them.
One would expect, given this governing majority-cum-monopoly, an
aggressive program of conservative governance would have been in
the offing to propel Jindal’s star into the heavens as the
Veepstakes beckoned. And when the governor’s education package,
complete with an aggressive school choice program and a revamp of
the teacher tenure rules,
sailed through the legislature over the
loud but effectively feeble objection of the teachers’ unions
and their Democrat water-carriers in the House and Senate, it
seemed such a program was well underway.
But a little more than two months later, Jindal’s critics are no
longer restricted to the moribund Democrats. He is, in fact,
hearing his loudest complaints from the state’s conservatives.
Because the state’s budget is a shambles — and the governor, whose
record as a conservative policy wonk is both impressive and
long-standing, is being blamed for the Bayou State’s sloppy
fisc.
How big is the problem? On Thursday, the Jindal-friendly
Louisiana Senate
voted unanimously to replace some $300 million in budget cuts
for fiscal year 2013 passed by the more fiscally-conservative
House, using a combination of “sweeps” from dedicated funds and
one-time revenue sources to finance the increased spending. That
vote was whipped vigorously by the governor, whose budget proposal
the Senate was largely restoring after it had been trimmed by the
House fiscal hawks.
This after the Senate voted to tap the state’s Budget
Stabilization Fund to the tune of $205 million in order to cover a
mid-year 2012 deficit, which materialized when revenue projections
from the previous year’s budget exercise proved overly
optimistic.
State law indicates the Budget Stabilization Fund, or “rainy-day
fund” as it’s commonly called, can only be tapped once every three
years. And that means Louisiana’s fiscal future is dire indeed.
Local blogger C.B. Forgotston, who has been ringing firebells in
the night for years over the poor performance of our political
class in painting a sustainable budgetary picture, summed up the
concerns of fiscal conservatives thusly:
“According to the experts, the outlook for the 2013 fiscal year
is dismal. State government will face another mid-year budget cut
in December in excess of $500 Million. In the spring there will be
another shortfall and thus another mid-year cut. The only question
is whether Bobby Jindal is in Baton Rouge or D.C.”
Jindal’s potential ascension to the national political picture
ought to be a positive for the state, but the perspective
Forgotston offers — that he’s biding his time before decamping to
Washington while critical state business isn’t being done — is one
that has gained purchase among the governor’s detractors on the
Right as the budget debate has proceeded.
To be fair, Jindal didn’t create the problem Louisiana faces
today. In fact, the governor’s supporters can rightly argue that
he’s made progress in whittling away much of the structural deficit
the state faces while upholding a hard pledge not to balance the
budget by raising taxes. Jindal has
eliminated over 6,000 positions in state government during his
term as governor, he has ratcheted real spending downward over the
past two years and he’s undergone structural reforms designed to
reduce Louisiana’s Medicaid
and state
retirement costs. Louisiana’s higher education establishment
and health care providers, spending on whose services has been the
primary target of the budget reductions given that higher education
and health care represent the majority of the state’s discretionary
spending, are anything but Jindal fans.
But his detractors aren’t measuring Jindal’s budgetary
performance against recent history, when the state’s economy was
riding high and its treasury was replete with recovery dollars from
Hurricane Katrina. They’re measuring his performance against the
state’s revenues. And for the past three years the budget process
has been a mad scramble to break piggy banks from Bastrop to
Cocodrie in an effort to fund what is now $25.6 billion in state
spending.
Jindal, like all Louisiana governors, has the leverage and power
over the Legislature to get most of his agenda passed in crunch
time — and he’s been ruthless in using that leverage on the
budget. As longtime political observer Jim Beam of the Lake
Charles American Press noted:
No one was really surprised Monday when the Senate Finance
Committee beefed up the budget for fiscal 2012-13 with $350 million
in additional spending. The money appears almost out of nowhere, as
it does every year.
Cooperative legislators always get rewards in the two money
bills. The Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee, for
example, approved a capital construction bill containing $100
million more in projects than there is money to spend in the year
beginning July 1.
And guess who gets to decide which projects get funding? None
other than Gov. Jindal. He also has line-item veto power over the
state budget and can penalize legislators who fail to toe the
line.
With the kind of power Beam describes, Jindal has the stroke to
force through the cuts to balance Louisiana’s budget if he chooses.
But the governor has opted for the one-time money instead.
Why? Because to actually balance Louisiana’s budget requires
choices that are nightmarishly difficult for a modern politician,
even one who was recently re-elected with 66 percent of the vote.
Jindal is hoping that a raft of pro-business policies he’s managed
to have enacted will begin to create the economic growth needed for
revenues to catch up to state spending.
Louisiana’s rankings on business friendliness have skyrocketed
under Jindal and that will inevitably bear fruit — though
next-door Texas, without a state income tax — has served as a
vacuum for economic growth at Louisiana’s expense for decades.
Which means to actually balance Louisiana’s budget for the
foreseeable future requires not just cutting health care and higher
education but downsizing their delivery systems.
For example,
Louisiana’s public colleges graduate just 38 percent of their
students in six years. Only three of those colleges — state
flagship LSU, Louisiana Tech, and the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette — graduate more than 40 percent. And of the 14 public
four-year campuses, only LSU, UL-Lafayette, and Southeastern
Louisiana University have enrollments above 10,000 students.
Clearly, the state is overbuilt where higher education is concerned
and even in good times it’s difficult to fund the panoply of public
universities at levels they would require for high-quality
operations. Merging or eliminating some of those schools is an
obvious necessity, but Jindal doesn’t have a taste for it this
year.
And Louisiana maintains a network of what it calls Charity
Hospitals, which now involve nine facilities spread out across the
state. Two of the “Charities” are teaching hospitals directly
connected with medical schools that LSU operates in New Orleans and
Shreveport; the rest maintain elements of a teaching function but
generally serve as brick-and-mortar operations serving Medicaid,
Medicare and indigent patients. Only about four percent of the
patients served by the “Charities” have private insurance. And with
health-care dollars generally following the patients in today’s
environment, the entire business model of a network of state-run
hospitals is a needless drag on the state budget to the tune of
hundreds of millions of dollars. But the idea of selling off some
of the “Charities” is one none of the state’s political class,
Jindal included, will touch.
Decisions like the ones described above aren’t easy. But if
Forgotston is correct and a budget deficit in excess of $500
million looms, with no more opportunities to raid the rainy day
fund, they’re the kinds of decisions Jindal will have to make.
Or perhaps Jindal’s successor will have to make them. If he’s in
Washington by the time the budget ax must finally fall, though,
today’s political star won’t be remembered as well as he’d like to
be.
