So yesterday, John Bel Edwards took to a podium at the state capitol and gave a speech extolling all of the amazing achievements his government managed in 2022. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was something out of a novel, as almost none of it particularly comported with reality.

On Monday, Governor John Bel Edwards gave an update on some of the successes the state had this year as well as his goals for the new year.

He talked about the continued excess in the budget and the major investments the money has gone toward. Hundreds of millions went towards one-time payments for infrastructure such as road and bridge projects that have needed improvements for decades. There have also been teacher pay raises and investments into higher education and early learning. The money is thanks to an influx of federal dollars for pandemic and hurricane recovery. The state’s economy has also swung back in a big way following the pandemic.

“We’ve gone from about a $2 billion deficit when I became governor to surpluses and excess that together show about $2 billion to the good. That is a huge step forward for our state,” Gov. Edwards said.

The state’s top economists have already outlined an excess of $925 million in the current fiscal year that will again go towards one-time investments. Gov. Edwards said with a shift in tax collections and an economic slowdown not far off, the state has to be responsible with its spending.

“We need to manage expectations so people understand what’s happening in the future. Which is why it’s really important that we grow, diversify our economy and we produce this extra revenue,” Gov. Edwards said.

There has been recent talk about doing away with the state’s income tax. When asked, the governor said there has to be a plan in place for how to replace the state’s revenue. There is already around $800 million that will need to be replaced when the half-cent sales tax rolls off and part of the vehicle tax is shifted to a construction sub-fund.

You can watch this thing, if you want, by clicking here.

Here’s a dissenting view offered as a balance to John Bel’s victory lap.

First of all, average Louisianans couldn’t give a red hot damn about Louisiana’s budget, since we now know that the state’s finances don’t track at all with the shape of our state’s economy.

Louisiana has been utterly stagnant for pretty much the entire time John Bel Edwards has been in office. We’re essentially in a lost decade at this point, and the net outmigration numbers over the past seven years are staggering. We’re down the better part of 200,000 people when comparing Louisianans who’ve moved away to people from elsewhere who are moving here.

We rank at or near the bottom of virtually every economic metric during the time he’s been in office. Capital is simply not invested here, because John Bel Edwards’ Louisiana is the least-friendly state in the South to business investment.

But he’s blown up a $25 billion budget to $40 billion, funding the same incompetent and oppressive government we’ve always had. And he thinks that constitutes success.

And all of the elements of this narrative are lies, so you’ll know. Edwards didn’t inherit a $2 billion deficit. He says that was the figure because the budget he presented to the state legislature that first year was a lot larger than what he inherited. A fiscal conservative would have held the line on spending and had a far smaller deficit which, as the facts bore out, could have been covered by existing revenues.

Instead, he oversaw the largest tax increase in Louisiana history and he brags that the budget has been in a state of surplus ever since. As though this is somehow a good thing.

Our economy doesn’t grow because our private sector is badly overtaxed, particularly in comparison to our neighbors who are beating our pants off with respect to growth and development, but because he runs a surplus that he uses to fund pay increases and grow government payrolls, not to mention give out sweetheart contracts to the status quo crowd, John Bel Edwards calls it prosperity.

And of course the federal government continues showering Louisiana with money, all of which robs us of our sovereignty on issues like infrastructure, health care, law enforcement and others. It’s so bad that Edwards bragged in his speech about getting the EPA to designate Baton Rouge’s polluted Capitol Lakes, which are essentially shallow man-made pits that water collects in (they have no outlet and therefore just get dirtier all the time), as a Superfund site. That brings federal dollars to pay to clean up the lake and somehow this is supposed to be progress, but Superfund is just about the most corrupt and wasteful process imaginable.

For $40 billion the state ought to be able to clean up the Capitol Lakes a lot quicker and cheaper to the taxpayers than the feds will. But of course doing things quickly and cheaply isn’t what Edwards is about. He’d rather it be slow and expensive, because then the people he’s pals with can rake off a lot more of your money to do that work – and Edwards and his crony consultants and others can wet their beaks off those tax dollars for a long time.

This will end up being an eight-year smash-and-grab operation for the governor and his pals. That’s what you get for letting him blow up the state’s budget. You certainly don’t get anything tangible from it.

The flyover ramp at the New Orleans Airport is still not finished. It became a political issue way back in the spring of 2019 when the airport was set to open. And remember, the new airport construction had already been commenced when John Bel Edwards took office seven years ago. Three years after the airport opened, the flyover ramps still aren’t done. And yet Edwards wants to talk about infrastructure?

The dirty secret that everybody knows is that Edwards prays every year for a major hurricane to hit the state. Why? Because hurricanes bring billions of dollars in recovery money and that’s just about the only economic stimulus the state has left. New Orleans has destroyed the tourism its economy was based on, and Edwards let that happen by failing to maintain the Louisiana State Police as an effective law enforcement presence in the city’s tourist areas. The State Police, which he debauched by covering up the abuses that led to Ronald Greene’s killing on a Union Parish roadside in 2019, is now 300 troopers short of its allotted strength and cannot surge into the Big Easy – or Baton Rouge or Shreveport, for that matter – to take a bite out of the rampant crime turning our cities into shooting galleries.

So your quality of life has taken a massive downturn, and Edwards takes delight in the fact that the government doing nothing to remedy the problem is a lot more expensive than it used to be.

Which makes you a peasant, not a citizen.

Edwards oversees a State Police which kills citizens on roadsides, a Department of Children and Family Services which places children with child molesters, a Department of Health which utterly mismanaged the COVID epidemic and wasted hundreds of millions of dollars – if not billions of dollars – in failing to promote effective treatment of COVID patients while shellacking the private sector economy with lockdowns. He’s turned LSU into a woke indoctrination camp which declines a little every year in the US News rankings. He’s been in office seven years and there is scant if any progress on a new bridge to replace the dilapidated I-10 structure in Lake Charles or a new bridge over the Mississippi south of downtown Baton Rouge.

Or I-49 south of Lafayette.

For $40 billion per year in a state budget those projects should all be finished. Instead they haven’t even started. But Edwards has managed to put half of the state on Medicaid, the least effective federal welfare program there is. He’s happy to call that an achievement.

But there’s no point in continuing to decry John Bel Edwards’ denial of his failure as Louisiana’s governor. It is what it is, and the people of Louisiana richly deserve him. After all, we didn’t just elect him once, we did it a second time.

His failure is our failure, and his lies are lies we’ve told to ourselves.

This coming year is going to be Louisiana’s opportunity to repudiate the sins and stupidities of the recent past and make a decision to join our neighbors who are kicking our asses in embracing true progress and prosperity. It’s likely we’ll do that, but it won’t be easy.

It won’t be easy because Edwards will fight such efforts at every turn. His reality is not actual reality, but he’ll defend it until he turns blue in the face. His speech yesterday proved that.