Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards has produced a track record of mendacity so obvious that his schtick has become knee-slapping to the informed public in Louisiana. And Edwards saved his best for last at his end-of-year news conference/end-of-office funerary, its ridiculousness punctuated by the most recent census data release.
This obloquy represented another segment of his ongoing propaganda campaign to convince any of the gullible within earshot that his two terms weren’t an undisputed failure. At the press conference, he topped what had been his previous most egregious of many fibs – when he told a radio audience he doubted black motorist Ronald Greene had died at the hands of Louisiana State Police without resisting arrest when he had been informed within hours of the incident over two years before – when this week he blithely and with all seriousness declared, “I can tell you that by any metric you can come up with and objectively speaking, we are much better off today than the day I first took office.”
Let’s count the many ways in which this assertion strays so far from truthfulness:
- This week, the annual population estimates released by the federal government show during his term that Louisiana lost over 100,000 in population. This more than 2 percent loss stands in great contrast to the nation as a whole that gained over 3 percent and the south without Louisiana rising well over 5 percent.
- This contributed to the several thousand jobs lost in the state over those nearly eight years while the nation gained plenty and helped to cause a lower proportion of able-bodied adults of working age being employed, 59 percent, than when he took office, giving Louisiana the nation’s seventh lowest rate as he leaves office ranking worse than when he entered.
- For those who stayed and worked, personal income growth lagged the nation’s and even more that of southeastern states’, at 35.6 percent. This didn’t much outpace price inflation at 28 percent.
- But what did grow much faster under his watch was government, spending 91 percent more overall or over three times the rate of inflation, compared to all states at 59 percent.
- A major driver of this spending frenzy was Medicaid expansion, which right before the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic cost Louisiana taxpayers $451 million annually (future data when released will show it went much higher thereafter). This Edwards has cited as his most significant policy change, in allegedly improving health outcomes, yet health indicators show the state’s relative ranking among its brethren actually slipped over the seven years it has been in effect.
- These resources instead might have gone to criminal justice changes that actually reduced criminal behavior. Edwards rolled out his own package he claimed would save money through reduced incarceration. Yet despite demographic changes which should have caused the state’s violent crime rate to fall, instead violent crime grew 11 percent while he was in office as opposed to it being flat nationally.
- Finally, and perhaps worst of all, in dealing with the pandemic research largely has discredited Edwards’ overenthusiastic lockdown policies which the numbers show cost more lives than saved.
Rather than evaluate his tenure on these metrics that measure human needs, Edwards tried to con audiences into buying the idea that better-off government should be the standard. Besides Medicaid expansion, he claimed spending more on infrastructure and the related state surpluses that helped to fuel that as proof of his statement of achievement. These, however, came from enormous debt-fueled spending triggered largely by his Democrat cohorts in Washington that caused inflation to rage which will hamper economic growth for years to come. And he also bragged about one of the lowest unemployment rates in history, but that is a direct consequence of fewer jobs and fewer people wanting to work spurred by more generous government benefits, some at the federal level but expansion being his doing.
We’re not fooled. At least we won’t have to suffer much longer this flim-flam man whom the data indisputably show took the state backwards, no matter how much he protests against the truth.