Term-limited state lawmakers may turn out to be the lucky ones next fall. They won’t have to explain to voters why they went along with Bobby Jindal’s fiscal insanity and cut more than $700 million from Louisiana’s public colleges and universities over the past seven years. Heck, the cuts could exceed $1 billion by Election Day, particularly since Jindal seems predisposed to do nothing in the face of a projected $1.4 billion budget gap. Well, not quite nothing — he is laying the groundwork for a quixotic presidential run. I’m not sure how he’s going to explain $1 billion in cuts to higher education, especially when he’s touting himself as the savior of public education in Louisiana. Then again, the national media rarely look beyond press releases, and voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have no clue what a liar Jindal is. To make matters worse, Jindal in subsequent years pushed budgets that clearly exceeded annual state revenues. A majority of lawmakers went along with the ruse. Jindal covered the deficits — yes, they were deficits because the state annually spent more than it took in — by breaking a campaign promise not to use one-time money for recurring expenditures. Over the years, Jindal got increasingly desperate in his use of non-recurring funds to pay for recurring costs, to the point that now, to paraphrase former Gov. Edwin Edwards, there’s nothing left to beg, borrow or steal. Thus we now hear talk of closing some college campuses. All of which makes Jindal the most fiscally irresponsible governor in modern Louisiana history. Not that he cares. He can’t wait to get out of here and start lying to voters on a grand scale.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 04:07:35 +0000
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