Rightly and for the most part, the negative legacy of Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards continues to slip into the sea, as the latest sign confirming the ruinous nature of Edwards’ regime reveals.

Last month, S&P Global Ratings raised Louisiana’s bond rating a notch. It now sits at AA, the third-highest, considered investment grade but with some nontrivial long-term risk. It’s the first change since a 2017 downgrade, and follows on an increase from Aa3 to Aa2 by Moody’s Investors Services in 2022 to the third highest ranking and the first change since a downgrade in 2016. The third major credit reviewer, Fitch’s, hasn’t made any changes since it downgraded the state’s debt in 2016.

It’s instructive to know the timeline here. Hamstrung by a sputtering national economy throughout the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama and in the later years at the state level stung by declines in oil prices even as for the most part Louisiana’s economy did better than the national throughout Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal’s terms, in his last year Jindal got the Legislature to go along with tax increases. Understand that Jindal tried to reduce state spending by making government more efficient, but even when the GOP captured majorities in the Legislature just before his second term began, he was unable to reduce spending that essentially remained flat during his second term. Revenues continued to be constrained, and while he tried to offset this with strategic reductions in overfunded accounts, clearly that strategy couldn’t last forever.

Thus, it was no accident that when Edwards entered office in 2016, with promises of bigger spending and higher taxes, credit agencies took a dim view of that strategy. A too-compliant Legislature, despite having GOP majorities saddled with some members of that bloc still beholden to the state’s liberal populist past, only resisted at the extremes. That became obvious to the agencies early on as their notes accompanying the downgrades indicated, although it took another year of this to convince S&P, an understanding that a tax-and-spend approach wasn’t going to solve anything in the long run.

We know the rest of the story. About the only thing fiscally that grew in Louisiana during Edwards’ two terms was state government, which in his first term ballooned 18 percent, or about two-and-a-half times faster than the inflation rate of 7.3 percent, then rocketed higher 58.2 percent or over three times the inflation rate of 18.9 percent over his second term’s budgeting cycle.

The results: over the next eight years the state depopulated, labor force participation dropped to its lowest levels in nearly half a century, and personal income growth lagged most states. This left S&P and Fitch’s unimpressed, although Moody’s first began to see light at the end of the Edwards tunnel, but chiefly because of the false economy artificially stimulated by the firehose of debt-fueled money pouring into the national economy that triggered the highest levels of price inflation in four decades, but which also boosted temporarily, yet unsustainably, state coffers.

What convinced S&P, naturally, was the ascension of Landry. It noted that the restructuring of pensions under Jindal as well as the decision that preceded him to put surpluses to one-time uses such as reducing unfunded accrued liabilities (a process set to accelerate and broaden by a somewhat-more assertive Legislature through a constitutional amendment bypassing Edwards, approved by voters last fall) helped set the stage, but it was Landry’s commitment to reducing spending, especially in light of his expressed desire to let temporary sales taxes roll off in the future even as the false economy begins to wear off, that sold them – something Edwards never did or would have supported.

If history is any guide, Fitch’s will follow in the near future with an upgrade. And as long as Landry and the Legislature follow through, the sun will keep rising on Louisiana’s fiscal fortunes, after an extended period of darkness.