As the sun rises over Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the 2021 legislative session will commence.
Being an odd-numbered year, the focus of the session is fiscal. To that end, legislators are only allowed to file five non-fiscal bills. The topics up for debate this session range from state spending to gas taxes to marijuana legalization to prostitution. The ongoing LSU sexual harassment scandals will also feature prominently.
Most importantly, however, all of the state’s fiscal issues will be overshadowed by incoming federal money that is supposed to act as a relief from the economic costs of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The federal money will fill a shortfall originally anticipated when the last federal money went away. Louisiana has been lucky in that back-to-back-to-back disasters have kept federal relief money coming in. Between hurricanes and a global pandemic, the loss of citizens and revenue has been replaceable.
However, that is not a sustainable model for Louisiana’s budget going forward. The state will eventually have to come up with the budget cuts or tax increases to save it… That is, of course, assuming any lawmaker is responsible actually wants to take a serious stab at it. Most proposals seem to be far more political than responsible, and as a result, the state stagnates.
There is already a massive outflow of citizens (and therefore taxpayers) from the state. Whether it’s insurance rates, taxes on businesses, or John Bel Edwards’ hostility toward the oil and gas industry, people don’t really want to remain here. It’s a problem that has done a lot of damage to the state’s budget issues, and the pandemic and killer hurricane season in 2020 didn’t help, either. There are holes in the budget we simply cannot fill because we do not have the taxpayer base to do so.
The solution then is to look at budget cuts, but there is a lot of money that is protected by the state’s bloated constitution. The state really can’t make cuts from anything except education and health, probably the two areas that can least afford it (to some extent, at least). But as long as there is a Democrat in the governor’s mansion, Louisiana Republicans are hesitant to call for a constitutional convention to rewrite the constitution to free up that money.
What’s more, a lot of conservatives don’t trust Louisiana Republicans not to screw this up, because while the legislature is near-supermajority in both houses, very rarely do solid conservative ideas get pushed hard enough to force John Bel Edwards to take a stance. It is infuriating to conservatives that the fights they promised haven’t materialized.
The phrase you will hear a lot this session is “Kicking the can down the road.” You will hear it as both sides claim there have to be changes to keep us from having a budget shortfall when the federal money goes away, but no one will do anything about it. You will hear Democrats say we need new revenue and that tax breaks for businesses will take away from that. You will hear Republicans say we have to bring in businesses, which will lead to jobs and therefore new revenue.
You will not hear either side seriously talk about cuts to a budget that’s been bloated since Hurricane Katrina. We are always adding spending, and never taking spending away. That will ultimately kill Louisiana’s chances of growth. If we had balanced things out seriously before now, we’d have this federal money coming in and we’d be able to fix the things we always say need fixing - infrastructure, schools that are falling apart, etc. - but we never actually think that far ahead.
Oh well. Just another session where everyone will talk big and Louisiana doesn’t actually change.