I have to think that it was in fact, a Democrat, that got the ball rolling. In Blanco's last year, the general fund was close to $10.4B, the highest point in history, mostly due to federal stimulus from Katrina and Rita. She approved a significant income tax cut by restoring excess itemized deductions as a personal income tax exemption. That was a partial repeal of the Stelly Plan and it included a sales tax reduction on food and home utilities. She also gave across the board state employee and teacher pay raises and spent a ton of surplus dollars on infrastructure. Jindal further repealed the Stelly Plan, state employment declined leading to a reduction in income tax, federal stimulus began to decline due to the recovery but so did tax revenue as the Katrina recovery started to decline. Jindal also stole future revenue by forcing lawsuit settlements. Contractors (not you Kyle) may have been gouging during the Katrina recovery period. In the past 7 years, overall spending has been cut for ag, social services, youth services, culture, recreation and tourism, and economic development. The courts and the Legislature have received expanding allowances. The Judiciary budget has risen 33% overall and 7% within the general fund, most of it due to the Auditor division relative to post-Katrina auditing. When you consider the constitutional protections that voters have approved the only two areas unprotected are education and health care. And now it seems the current legislators are stuck with a massive budget deficit with no way to change it OTHER than education and health care. I did a lot of reading last night....the way everything is set up, failure was highly predictable. Maybe everything should be scrapped and start over without all the administrative minutiae.
Very informative article here. Author points out 1.34 Billion in state revenues that no one in Baton Rouge is talking about. Hopefully they will before they pass a boatload of new taxes. LINK
I loathe Kathleen Blanco but it takes a helluva stretch to blame this on her. Jindal was the governor for 8 years and did nothing about our mounting fiscal crisis.
I think some of the things Kennedy proposed should be implemented as I don't think that has anything to do with Tops - article I read this morning said the sports that really count on Tops to supplement their scholarships are baseball and softball. I think the no-football comment was an attention-getter; he was saying, if we don't fix this, schools will have to close, and you can't have a college football team without a college.
