Editor’s Note: A guest post from Stephen Swiber, who’s running for the Louisiana Senate in District 21 (a seat currently held by Bret Allain).
“Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”
No one is quite sure who first said this quote, but nowhere has its message been more urgent than in Louisiana in 2023. Crime is way up, the economy is still down, and young people are leaving the state in droves.
While voters at home cry out for good government, the politicians we send to Baton Rouge haven’t changed their way of doing business since the days of Huey Long. This year, knowing it’s an election year, Baton Rouge legislators resorted to the cheap trick of robbing Peter to pay Paul. They blew straight through the constitutional spending cap to bribe constituents in the hope that we won’t notice how poorly our economy has performed under their watch. While some of the projects funded are certainly worthwhile, the effort to spend all of the available money this year is an accounting gimmick that will leave a gigantic mess for the next legislature.
Let’s review the performance of the legislature under Governor John Bel Edwards. Back in 2015, state tax collections were around $9.4 billion. In 2022, those taxes were up to $15.4 billion, an increase of over 63%! That’s during a period of little to no economic growth and when the state is receiving historically monumental amounts of money from a D.C. spending spree. This session, legislators budgeted a staggering $51 billion for 2024, practically doubling the $25.8 billion budget of 2015.
Legislators have not “brought home the bacon” for their constituents- they’ve taxed you like crazy and now demand that you thank them to get some of it back.
This year’s spending is totally unsustainable. Louisiana is now facing a “fiscal cliff” if legislators don’t renew the “temporary” tax increase from 2018, so they will. Politicians are addicted to spending – once the size of government grows it’s very hard to rein it back in.
A conservative minority of legislators pushed for a sensible spending plan. They wanted to pay down debt, save for the future, and still fund critical infrastructure projects that local officials asked for. The debt repayments in turn would have freed up local school budgets, allowing for pay raises for teachers. All of this could’ve been done without breaking the spending cap. However, this group of conservative legislators was coerced back into line by the career politicians in cahoots with the Democrat governor. The tax-and-spend coalition won.
But there’s hope on the horizon. The voters in their wisdom passed term limits, and term limits give us an opportunity in 2023 to clean house.
I’m running in Senate District 21 to correct the mistakes made by the tax-and-spend coalition. The next Governor will need our help cleaning up this mess.