Left Louisiana World – or some of it – is having a veritable cow today over an executive order that Gov. Jeff Landry put out yesterday afternoon…

The thing to recognize about this is it’s Landry taking the opportunity to sequester as much of the idiotic, wasteful spending that John Bel Edwards and his sycophants in the legislative leadership busily ladled out in the last term.

We talked about this last year – the fact that these people were busily shoveling as much of that surplus as they could into as many governmental rat-holes as they could. This was done in an effort to pay off as many cronies as possible, as many state contractors who had greased Edwards and his pals as they could.

And it was also an effort to stick it to Landry in a couple of ways.

First, that spending was aimed at burdening Landry with uneconomic waste. If you’re a fan of classic science fiction, think of the great Dune novels made into a few attempts at film (the David Lynch 1984 movie starring Kyle McLachlan and Sting wasn’t the best thing ever, but the Denis Villenueve two-part series of films might just be; we’ll see what Part Two looks like when it hits the theaters in the spring). House Atreides, that’s Landry in this analogy, takes over Planet Arrakis, that’s Louisiana, from House Harkonnen, that’s Edwards and his old cronies in the Legislature, and finds out that everything is booby-trapped and he’s been set up to fail.

It doesn’t really go all that well for Duke Leo Atreides, you’ll know if you’ve read the books or watched the movie. Landry’s determined to catch a little better result.

So this executive order is aimed at trying to claw back as much of that swag as possible and maybe begin right-sizing state government.

There’s grumbling about this, though the left-leaning groups like the Louisiana Budget Project and Public Affairs Research Council managed to hold their fire so far when Landry said he’s looking at a $64 million shortfall for 2025 that balloons to $559 million and $733 million, respectively, in the two years that will follow.

The 0.45 cent state sales tax that Edwards rammed through the Legislature back in 2016 – you’ll remember that one; he said that college football in Louisiana would be going away unless he got that tax increase, and the idiots in the Legislature actually bought it, then Edwards proceeded to double the state’s budget over the course of the next seven years – will be rolling off the books next year. And that’s why the budget will drop off a “fiscal cliff.”

There is no fiscal cliff. There is a runaway, incontinent government which exercises an abjectly criminal waste of our tax dollars doing lots of things which distort markets, crowd out the private sector, set cash on fire and pay cronies beyond any possible justification for what services they do provide to the people.

Louisiana is no better off with a $50 billion budget than it was with a $25 billion budget.

There is an organization out there called the Louisiana Health Equity Center, which is one of those Soros-y outfits which exists to bitch about the disparity in healthcare outcomes between white people and black people in Louisiana. Yesterday they held a luncheon to push something they call 40By2030, which is a demand that Louisiana get to 40th place in the nation in healthcare by the end of the decade.

What place is Louisiana in now? 50th, they say.

After eight years of John Bel Edwards blowing up the state budget to twice the size it was when he found it, we have the worst healthcare in the country. And the Left is touting a demand that would put us just outside the bottom ten.

Meaning they want to waste even more of your money, because apparently an extra $25 billion wasn’t enough.

This is the real legacy of John Bel Edwards. This and the runaway outmigration which is analogous to those Harkonnen land mines left everywhere. Landry is going to have to get extremely aggressive if he wants to right this ship. That executive order yesterday is a pretty fair indicator that he knows it.