Did you spot this story yesterday?

While the rest of the nation has far surpassed the number of jobs lost during the coronavirus pandemic, Louisiana is one of only a handful of states that has still not recovered to what is a relatively low threshold in a burgeoning economy.

Louisiana had roughly 1.96 million jobs in February 2020, about a month before the COVID-19 pandemic reached the state and prompted emergency lockdowns that shuttered businesses and spurred layoffs across many job sectors.

With roughly 1.96 million jobs as of May 2024, the state’s job numbers have nearly rebounded but remain about 1.5% short of the pre-pandemic figure, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The United States, as a whole, recovered all of its pandemic job losses by June 2022 and has been growing steadily since then, surpassing the pre-pandemic figures by 4.2% or 6.3 million jobs as of May.

Louisiana is one of only five states that has yet to recover on the employment front. The others are Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont. Like Louisiana, they are all just shy of their pre-pandemic job numbers.

Louisiana’s metropolitan areas, except for Baton Rouge and Lafayette, have struggled to regain their pandemic job losses. Baton Rouge has outshined the rest of the state by exceeding the February 2020 threshold by roughly 3% or 13,000 jobs, while Lafayette has broken even.

The New Orleans-Metairie area, the largest metropolitan statistical area in the state, remains about 4% shy of its pre-pandemic employment with a deficit of roughly 26,000 jobs.

The leisure and hospitality job sector, which services the tourism industry, has experienced the most stubborn recovery among all of Louisiana’s sectors, according to BLS data. It remains over 8% shy of its pre-pandemic level.

This is likely what is preventing a full recovery in the tourism-heavy New Orleans area, according to three economists interviewed for this report.

Of course, this piece originally came from the Louisiana Illumigroomer, so its premise – that Joe Biden has been a regular ol’ job creation engine (there has been virtually no growth at all in jobs among American citizens under Biden; it’s been all bounce-back jobs from the COVID lockdowns and illegals getting hired in jobs that were unfilled because Americans wouldn’t apply for them) – is false.

But you’d expect the bounce-back jobs to hit in Louisiana, seeing as though this was one of the worst state economic declines when the pandemic hit.

That happened because of John Bel Edwards’ lockdowns, of course.

But as we said at the time, when you’re already uncompetitive with neighbors like Texas, Florida and Tennessee because of your poor economic policies (and in our case we’re dealing with almost a century’s worth of stupid Longite economics stultifying our economic growth), and then those neighbors either don’t lock down due to COVID or lift their lockdowns quickly while your tyrannical control freak governor does everything he can to keep his state under a COVID regime, you will bleed jobs, capital and population all the faster.

And that’s what happened.

The Illumigroomer interviewed former LSU economist Loren Scott, who said part of the problem in recovering jobs is there aren’t enough workers to fill them. Why do you think that happened? There was already a shortage of qualified workers in this state, and then Edwards locked its economy down while Texas was doing business as normal. And naturally, that meant lots of Louisiana people picked up and left for Texas.

Are they going to come back? Probably not.

So yeah, we’re not back to where we were before COVID hit. And we won’t get there, much less catch up even to the anemic Biden recovery nationwide, until real economic reform happens.

We’d love to see it come as a result of a special session next month which revamps Louisiana’s tax code and puts the product of the session in front of the voters in November. Either way, though, Louisiana’s legislature is going to have to repudiate Edwards’ taxes-and-tyranny legacy by opening the state up to investment and growth. We need a tax code which rewards entrepreneurship and makes this place the best possible location to start and grow a small business. We have never had that.

And until we do have it, we will be stuck with blue-state backwaters like Hawaii and Vermont.

That’s something the people at the Illumigroomer, funded by out-of-state leftist nonprofits of the George Soros variety, will ever admit, just like they won’t admit Edwards is the reason our job recovery is hamstrung.