Letters: Jindal’s smoke-and-mirrors budget

Once again Bobby Jindal’s legislative puppets have displayed their lack of an important part of their anatomy, a spine.

They have fallen for “King Bobby’s” smoke and mirrors game by passing a budget that is based upon intentionally overestimated revenue projections, as was this past year’s.

Consequently, the state will again by next April face a deficit requiring Bobby and his staff to make the very cuts in health and education that he threatened would occur if the legislators didn’t pass his budget as submitted.

You’d think his puppets would have learned by now!

However, Jindal will probably earn the legacy he so diligently seeks, but not the one he wants; namely, one of the most incompetent fiscal managers this state has ever seen.

Jim Anderson

retired director of accountability of New Orleans public schools

Ponchatoula

Comments

1) Comment by InPVille - 08/06/2012

The American Legislative Exchange Council, The Council on Foreign Relations, Bohemian Grove, The New World Order, Skull & Bones, Bilderberg Group, Free Masons, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Illuminati, and on top of them all Big Pharma. They are all fronts for the same entity. But what does it matter. The world is going to end on December 21, 2012 anyway.

2) Comment by InPVille - 08/06/2012

@gravityassist: ". . . so press the well-known, fear-mongering “scare” about . . ." Blah, Blah, Blah. It appears you dish out the scare and fear-mongering with the best of them! ALEC? Whatever, man?!?!

3) Comment by InPVille - 08/06/2012

@gravityassist: "Democrats vote for things that are good for people..." -[**]- Well they certainly vote for things which are good for SOME people. Sometimes the people it is good for also includes the Democrats who vote for the "good things". Let us consider the Wisconsin recall issue. Democrats had created a nice symbiotic relationship with government employees whereby over the course of the years, the Democrats granted benefits to government employees and the government employees helped Democrats attain and retain office. However, eventually the situation became one where it could truly be said that "some are more equal than others". The government employees were receiving pay and benefits far more(sometimes 20%+ more) than those outside state government performing comparable work. The labor movement was created to give workers a greater share in the wealth they helped create. Fair enough! However, it is not the function of government to produce a profit for it's owners/investors(in this case the government workers and politicians. Rather it is to serve all the citizens. -[**]- Oh! You will say. "But the big bad corporations and Republicans raised all this money in order to defeat us." That is not where the problem lay. The question you need to ask yourself is why were you not able to do what Democrats did in 2005 in the state of California when then governor Schwarzenegger tried to reduce existing union benefits. "The anti-Schwarzenegger coalition raised and spent more than $100 million against him." REF: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/09/MNG6IFLAMF1.DTL The Walker supporters were not able to raise anywhere near this amount of money. Why were you only able to raise about 1/33rd the amount as last time?

4) Comment by gravityassist - 07/06/2012

The fate of Louisiana – and every state with predominantly Republican leadership – is in the hands of the ALEC (the “American Legislative Exchange Council,” also affectionately referred to as “All Legislation Equals Cash”) – a non-profit (ha!) lobbying operation for corporations.// They’ve been in existence since 1973, and their sole raison d'être is the cookie-cutter, assembly-line-like creation of legislation that is always aimed at producing environments for creating and sustaining profits for business and corporations - regardless of the consequences for real, flesh-and-blood people.//You can think of ALEC as the ultimate practitioner of the “art of possibility.”//The privatization of government services – like education and prisons is a sure-fire path to more corporatism, so spread the meme: government is “evil,” and “down with government,” and when you obtain the political power to do so, quickly do things like pass legislation re-routing public money into private education (destroying public education)..// Democrats vote for things that are good for people (hence bad for business), so anything that suppresses Democratic votes has got to be good (never mind the Constitution and all those pesky inalienable rights). Let’s roll-back registration opportunities, require onerous identification rules and make up stuff about lots of voting fraud among Democrats so we can claim to be legitimately purging their roles// Health care privatization is under attack, so press the well-known, fear-mongering “scare” about socialism, to keep real change at bay. //I could go on like this, exposing the corporatizing Republican agenda in all areas of our existence – and its deleterious effect on people - for a whole page. The ultimate objective is to suspend the Constitution’s rights and protections, privatize all government and turn America into a corporate fascist state. If you think “government” is “wasting” your tax dollars, wait till your credit card rates hit 45-70% and you no longer have an existing right to protection from unregulated greed.//The bottom line: If you really want to “take this country back,” think before you vote Republican. They are the ones stealing it from you.

5) Comment by DMJ - 07/06/2012

We can change the state constitution. It's been done many times (151 to be exact). Strangely, I haven't heard Jindal and co. call for any such constitutional amendment. Plus, look at Jindal's early career. He made his bones cutting money from education and health care. It's kind of his thing. And of couse, since he's a Republican, additional revenue (tax increases...horrors!!!!) can never be part of the equation. Nor could we stop subdidizing the Oil and Gas industry either.... Ugh.

6) Comment by InPVille - 07/06/2012

@DMJ: As has been point out by this worthy paper and pointed to by myself in a couple of discussions already, the Louisiana Constitution and statutes protect a number of regular budget items from being cut. This is true for neither health care or education and both are major budget outlays. When state revenue is not adequate to cover anticipated costs the money must be cut from somewhere. Blame can be placed on the citizens who voted to put the restrictions into the constitution and to law makers who will not reconsider the restrictive statutes. If as is being claimed the current budget is based on bad estimates of future revenues, the amounts of the cuts would have had to have been even greater.

7) Comment by DMJ - 07/06/2012

Jim, cuts in health care and education are the whole point. Sure, they'll shrug their shoulders and apologzie while doing it, but make no mistake....cutting services isn't the byproduct; it's the product. They're what's known as "Republicans." They like low taxes and reduced services. It's the fox guarding the henhouse.

8) Comment by InPVille - 07/06/2012

Smoke and Mirror Budgeting has a long tradition in the United States at all levels of government and is committed by both parties. At the national level one way it happens is by using money borrowed from retirement plans to make it appear the deficit & debt are less than it is in reality. Pres Clinton & Newt Gingrich both claim a balanced budget using this dodge. It is wrong wherever and whoever does it. -[**]- @Gary - Given Louisiana's image as being at or on the bottom of all the good lists and the reverse on the good lists, how much of a chance was there ever that Romney would pick Jindal anyway?

9) Comment by 8point6 - 07/06/2012

Nothing new here.

10) Comment by gary - 07/06/2012

Agreed. Bobby has got to realize that the train "done left the station" - Mitt is going to pick someone for VP from a swing state - his budget scam and education reform will be for "0".