Was Bobby Jindal Worse for Louisiana Than Hurricane Katrina?

[applegrove]

Was Bobby Jindal Worse for Louisiana Than Hurricane Katrina?

by Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/11/was-bobby-jindal-worse-for-louisiana-than-hurricane-katrina.html

"SNIP.............



What did he do with it? More money to LSU, to offset tuition increases, maybe? Build hospitals and highways to beat the band, like the old Kingfish did? Anything in the way of far-sighted public investment? Nope. Tax cuts. Loads of them. Oh, and what we call “tax expenditures,” too—tax credits that a government hands out to both individuals and businesses.


The surplus fizzled quickly. Undeterred, in 2013, Jindal proposed getting rid of the state’s income tax entirely, replacing it with sales taxes, which hit the poor much harder than anyone else, since poor people spend a far bigger percentage of their income just buying stuff. Then oil prices plummeted, which is the one thing that happened that isn’t Jindal’s fault; but developments like that are why states have rainy-day funds, which Louisiana has shot through. By 2015, the old surplus had become a $1.6 trillion deficit. The people at the top were happy, still paying far less in taxes than they had been, but the only thing trickling down to everyone else
were the whopping budget cuts to state services.


Why did all this happen? In part, of course, because Jindal, like so many of the rest of them, is an ideologue who drinks the Kool-Aid of supply-side economic theory. And in part because he was intent on running for president, and to run for president as a Republican governor, you have to have amassed a record of off-the-charts tax cuts. It’s the cover charge. You don’t even get in the door unless you’ve done that.


So Jindal ran, and humiliated himself, as anyone with half a brain knew he was going to do, frittering away even more money from those stupid enough to have written him a check. And he’s not governor anymore. And what is Louisiana left with? The biggest financial crisis in the country by far. Sam Brownback’s Kansas was, and still is, bad. Ditto Scott Walker’s Wisconsin. But Louisiana takes the dubious gold.


The state agency that investigates child abuse already has one-third fewer employees than before all this madness started. And higher education is a nightmare. State funding of higher ed is down a barely believable 44 percent.




..............SNIP"

[Kip Humphrey]

1. love the headline! [my answer inside]

OF COURSE HE WAS.

[Jackie Wilson Said]

2. Imagine if a liberal did what Trump is doing as to wanting crowds to commit violence

Wonder how long he or she could get away with it.

Cant find a single thread on DU talking about how bad Trump is so I had to put it here, all of the threads are about how bad Hillary is.

[CC]

3. And now you have a Democratic Governor that is going

to have to make hard decisions to fix the damage Jindal left. If he can fix it. Not sure how cooperative LA legislature will be. When it is time for elections again be prepared for those that benefited now to run ads attacking your governor for raising taxes and leaving a structural deficit as they try to con voters into another Republican. The super PAC's will dived that sales tax increase into an add claiming he raised taxes on 40 things like school cl others, book bags, etc. We still have idiots blaming all our ills on Owe Malley.

[KamaAina]

5. "Not sure how cooperative LA legislature will be."

Not much. Both houses are still controlled by repukes.

[CC]

8. Hoping things

change for the better sooner rather than later.

[Fairgo]

4. Which is worse the termite queen or the colony?

I get the drift and concede the point, but this is two different levels of experiential hell...for those who drowned in their attics as the water rose, as the person who was abandoned in her wheelchair and drowned as the water rose, bodies rotting in the heat, thousands dead in a matter of days, as the psychiatrists who committed suicide in despair, the diaspora of the poor as lived experience, the mentally ill turned away from the red cross tents...Katrina was socio/cultural rape made possible by whorehouse governance stretching back over decades. It was the corruption of generations capped by the escapades of the levy board, that made Katrina the phenomenon it was in New Orleans and St Bernard parishes. Jindal is just as dispicable as you want him to be, but he was not an aberration, nor was he particularly powerful. He was a tool, the "wunderkind" who was conveniently sub-continent and a wholly owned subsidiary of the mob that runs the state. Nothing changed in Louisiana governance after Katrina. The answer to your question is neither. In both cases, you are simply pointing at surface symptoms of the real horror...that we will likely never face.

[KamaAina]

6. Check back in about ten years.

NOLA is largely back on its feet, although tens of thousands of residents have not returned are are not likely to.

The question is, where will the Gret Stet be ten years after Hurricane Piyush?

[StevieM]

7. Bump!! People need to know what a total disaster Bobby Jindal was as governor.

One of the worst in the country.

And, of course, that's really saying something, given how fierce the competition is.