Aren’t you tired of watching this place rank last in the nation time after time on those public policy metrics rankings? Well, it’s happened yet again…

Louisiana’s economic performance between 2011 and 2021 ranked dead last in the nation in the 16th edition of the Rich States, Poor States analysis.

The American Legislative Council on Thursday released the 2023 edition of its state economic competitiveness index, which analyzes 15 state policy variables to rank states by economic outlook, and three to rank by economic performance over a decade.

The latter is measured by state gross domestic product, absolute domestic migration, and non-farm payroll between 2011 and 2021, variables the report contends are “highly influenced by state policy.”

ALEC ranked Louisiana 50th out of 50 states overall, maintaining the state’s last place finish in 2022.

The state’s cumulative growth in gross domestic product over the decade was 12.45%, ranked 48th, while absolute domestic migration was negative 160,671, which placed 40th.

Louisiana’s non-farm payroll also declined by 1.24%, which ranked 46th in the nation.

Neighboring Texas was ranked seventh in the same category, while Arkansas was ranked 15th and Mississippi 37th. States with the best economic performance include Florida in first, followed by Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Washington, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

The Bayou State fared slightly better with the report’s economic outlook rankings, which measures variables including tax rates, recently legislated changes, debt service as a share of tax revenue, public employees per 10,000 population, minimum wage, right-to-work status, and others.

“Each of these factors is influenced directly by state lawmakers through the legislative process,” according to the report, authored by economists Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore and Jonathan Williams. “Generally speaking, states that spend less – especially on income transfer programs — and states that tax less — particularly on productive activities such as working or investing – experience higher growth rates than states that tax and spend more.”

Interestingly enough, while Louisiana came in dead last in the performance rankings we’re only 26th in ALEC’s economic outlook rankings…

What to take from that? Well, obviously we’re a classic underachiever, so there’s that. We’re in the 20’s every year in ALEC’s outlook rankings and yet we perform at the bottom every year.

That underachievement should tell you something. It should tell you that Dead Last Louisiana isn’t a poor state – Dead Last Louisiana does things the wrong way. We have a poor status quo, and we have astonishingly poor leadership, and it’s the difference between our being at or around the national average in economic performance…and where we are.

We’re in the final year of John Bel Edwards’ tenure in office and the graphs should show how poorly we’ve performed. Very much below-average state GDP, despite massive increases to the state budget (and government spending is a piece of GDP), catastrophic net outmigration, flat non-farm payroll employment other than the jarring effects of COVID.

He begs every summer and fall for a hurricane to hit us, because other than something like that happening we’re unlikely to attract any major amount of economic activity at all.

It hurts to be this pathetic. It’s demoralizing. And Louisiana’s voters are absolutely fed up. Look for a very chaotic, undoubtedly red-wave election this fall.