A recent article musing about Louisiana population loss contains a lot bathos, signifying the difficulty, if not unwillingness, that the state’s leftist institutions have in accepting what is plain to everybody else.

Last week, the Baton Rouge Advocate ran a piece about the latest 2023 census numbers, which show most Louisiana parishes lost population. The state as a whole lost over 14,000 people in 2023, bringing the total loss compared to 2015 to nearly 120,000 even as the country as a whole, and most states, grew in numbers. In fact, the state’s 0.31 percent loss trailed in percentage terms only New York, and of the seven states that did lose population, four were among the largest blue states, with purple Pennsylvania barely slipping and only West Virginia joining Louisiana among red states.

Only Ascension, Beauregard, Bossier, Calcasieu, De Soto, East Feliciana, Iberville, Lafayette, Livingston, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Vermillion, and West Baton Rouge gained – a few barely – and none over one percent. Metropolitan statistical areas were a mixed bag: energy-intensive areas Lafayette and Lake Charles, Northshore Hammond and Slidell-Covington-Mandeville, and Baton Rouge eked out gains. But Shreveport-Bossier City, Monroe, Alexandria, Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, and New Orleans-Metairie all shrunk. In fact, New Orleans led the country in MSA slumping at 1.15 percent, while Houma was fifth worst at 0.85 percent, Alexandria 16^th worst at 0.60 percent, Shreveport 36^th worst at 0.43 percent, and Monroe 46^th worst at 0.34 percent. Hammond’s 0.92 percent growth was best in the state and 92^nd best nationwide.

Louisiana’s rural areas fared even worse than its urban, while overall suburban areas held their own. That 50 parishes lost population flummoxed the Advocate, which went on an extensive expedition in search of explanations as to why since the 2020 census this had happened.

Natural disasters clearly had a role, but this masked some notable divergences. For example, Lake Charles was coming back from its travails with Laura and Delta both hitting in 2020, but Houma wasn’t. And obviously a lot of places hadn’t had adverse weather events strike them in the past three-plus years.

So, setting aside idiosyncratic elements, it had to be policy, and to her credit Alison Plyer, the longtime chief demographer of New Orleans’ Data Center, hit upon that when queried by the reporter. But, as students will tend to do in answering essay questions, they may guess correctly the right answer but provide the entirely wrong reasons to explain it.

Plyer fell victim to this in two ways, although one was only a partial bogey. She observed the poorer health statistics reflected by Louisianans compared to almost every other state, which would lead to earlier deaths offsetting births. Set aside, of course, this is a temporary effect; changes in cohort life spans would influence overall population extremely marginally so long as the birth cohorts remained constant, so an ongoing fall caused by shorter lifespans would make sense only in the context of a sudden drop in life expectancy that isn’t occurring (even if a relatively rapid one such as during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic happens, it also happened elsewhere, so relative change among states would be extremely marginal).

But that shouldn’t be happening in Louisiana, using the left’s assumptions, because–Medicaid expansion! Now almost eight years old, that was supposed to provide all sorts of additional health care that people were missing to improve their lives. In reality, a large minority of its new clients years ago simply dropped their private insurance (or their employers did it when expansion rolled out) to get a new freebie, so it’s not like they didn’t have health care insurance already. That is, of course, if they could access Medicaid, with its limited providers and a lowest common denominator approach that degraded the quality of care. And while you can throw health care at people, you can’t make them live healthy lives that would decrease their health care usage. So, for the extra $450 million or so a year Louisiana taxpayers pony up to subsidize other people’s health care, there’s very little bang for the buck or explanatory power for population loss (if anything, hanging out a new benefit not available in nearly all of the fastest-growing states should attract residents).

But Plyer also made a very ignorant statement. Not her observation that higher educational attainment helps to drive population growth, but that state taxpayer subsidization falling a third since 2008 on a per higher education student basis indicates that Louisiana spent less money on tertiary education. In fact, in fiscal year 2008 $2.766 billion for 201,557 students was budgeted for higher education or $13,723 per student, while in FY 2024 that will be $3.453 billion for 217,618 students or $15,867 per student, an increase of 15.6 percent. The hoary and tired contention that Louisiana has “disinvested” in higher education is an exhausted myth.

Yes, policy is the explanation, but not derived from the blind alleys in the article. It’s very simple: the cause is Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ big spending, tax raising, benefit boosting (such as Medicaid expansion), social justice pandering regime, insufficiently resisted by a Republican Legislature short on leadership that only deigned to rein in Edwards’ worst attempted excesses. It discouraged producers from producing, if not their staying in the state, and encouraged wasteful spending, criminal coddling, and more people jumping on the wagon. It not only led to depopulation, but fewer jobs than when he took office, anemic personal income growth that barely outpaced inflation, crime rates heading higher at an above average pace, and a coarsening culture that pandered to ideological special interests.

And, of course, it was the three central cities with Democrat mayors and solid Democrat majorities on their city councils – New Orleans, Shreveport (although it now has a GOP mayor), and Alexandria – which were among the worst performing local jurisdictions. However, one may notice that Lafayette and Lake Charles, run by Republicans, bucked the trend.

Those shortcomings are the wages of liberalism and are the kinds of things that drive people away – but leftist institutions aren’t going to admit that and will try to find any lame excuse in the book to deflect from that. They refuse to see what is painfully obvious to everybody else, which makes the musings in that article largely irrelevant, if not entirely counterproductive to reversing the state’s depopulation trend.