The ancient Lake Charles American Press’ opinion writer whose columns increasingly come off as though he’s imbibing his namesake on a much-too-regular basis has been around forever, and at one point Beam was considered to be a right-of-center pundit.

That time is long gone, and what’s better said about Beam is that he isn’t a conservative, but rather a slave to the status quo.

Either that, or whatever comes out of Lake Charles has to be good in his eyes.

What brought this to our notice was a column Beam wrote today about a symposium the Public Affairs Research Council held with a few state legislators on tax reform. All the usual things were said – everything has to be on the table, including things like dumping out exemptions to the state’s sales taxes on necessity items like groceries, which would magically cover the projected state deficit for next year and then some. They’re saying the deficit looks to be $340 million for 2026, $370 million for 2027 and $508 million for 2028, and you can raise $584 million a year by taxing sales of groceries and utility bills and so forth.

Beam noted that Rep. Julie Emerson poo-poo’ed that idea, and rightly so, as she recognized it’ll take a two-thirds vote in the legislature to kill those exemptions – doing so is a tax increase, after all, and this legislature was not elected by the voters to put in tax increases.

Which is something people like Jim Beam simply do not understand.

He wrote this…

The late-Rep. Vic Stelly of Moss Bluff sponsored the 2002 tax reform plan that increased income taxes to make up for revenues lost by those exempted sales taxes. He made it possible for legislators to change the income taxes, but he put the sales tax exemptions in the state constitution, knowing it would be difficult to change.

Passage of Stelly’s tax plan was a rare example of successful Louisiana tax reform. Unfortunately, Republican lawmakers complained about the higher income taxes and they lowered them in 2008. However, those exemptions are still in the constitution. And state Rep. Matthew Willard of New Orleans, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said during the webinar they are going to stay there.

Good grief. Seriously?

Texas doesn’t have a state income tax. Florida doesn’t have a state income tax. Tennessee doesn’t have a state income tax. Mississippi and Arkansas are phasing out their state income taxes. And Jim Beam is pining for those halcyon days of RINO Vic Stelly and his blue-state-model state income tax which turbocharged Louisiana’s outmigration problem and injected every city in Texas with a big dose of Cajun flavor.

There is a reason that from the time Stelly’s tax hikes passed, every conservative in Louisiana began screaming to get rid of them, and a few years later when Bobby Jindal took office amid a sizable Katrina/Rita recovery money-fueled state surplus, he found himself stampeded by legislators desperate to dump Stelly into the ash-heap of history.

The goal is to get rid of the state income tax altogether, not raise it. Anybody who thinks Louisiana can halt our massive net outmigration issues and begin participating in the relative boom economy of the South by sustaining the worst tax structure in the region is an idiot.

No, I didn’t just call Jim Beam an idiot. His columns function as such, though, and they belie the biggest problem we have in this state where its public fisc is concerned.

Which is this idea that the state must come first rather than the people.

Very few Louisianans believe we’re getting good value for our tax dollars. In fact, when the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC had WPA Intelligence poll the question last year, only 24 percent of the respondents said they agreed with that proposition. Sixty-eight percent disagreed, and the “strong disagrees” were 50 percent.

So if the state is wasting your tax dollars, that’s a mandate for the elected leadership of the state to cut the budget. Do less. Find efficiencies.

If there’s a half a billion dollars’ worth of a deficit in a $50 billion budget, then you don’t need to shake down the taxpayer for any more money.

You can find those savings in the Louisiana Department of Health alone. Its budget is obscenely large and it spends money in the most inefficient ways imaginable. In fact, that’s what they’re doing, as The Center Square reported last week. LDH has already come up with $105 million in money it doesn’t need to spend, which with federal matching funds comes to $332 million in savings just on a cursory first-pass through a $20 billion department budget.

John Bel Edwards doubled the state budget in eight years. The idea that Louisiana’s public sector “can’t afford” tax reform which makes us economically competitive even with long-time supposed basket cases like Arkansas and Mississippi (the real fact is that Arkansas and Mississippi have had a hell of a lot better economic development results than we have for quite some time now) is…

Bullshit. It’s bullshit.

And it’s people like Jim Beam who act like the state budget is somehow sanctified, and none of these agencies can be cut or their responsibilities devolved to local governments, who are holding us back.

When the appropriations process gets started and LDH’s budget really begins to pare back, pay attention to the numbers the legacy media uses in talking about the “draconian” cuts Jeff Landry and the legislature are making. They’ll talk about $332 million in cuts rather than $105 million and they’ll talk about the opportunities lost from not drawing down those federal funds.

But they’ll never talk about whether all that money does any good.

John Bel Edwards blew up Louisiana’s budget by signing up as many people for Medicaid as he could. Medicaid, described by Louisiana’s pre-eminent RINO Bill Cassidy as “the illusion of health insurance,” and Cassidy would know because he’s a gastroenterologist who worked the Charity system and saw nothing but Medicaid and indigent patients, is just about the worst excuse for health coverage imaginable. It pays diddly poo to doctors so most of the good ones won’t accept Medicaid patients, and therefore Medicaid recipients just go to the emergency room when something is wrong with them. So the ER’s are clogged, and the cost is over the top to the taxpayer, and studies have shown that this drives medical outcomes for Medicaid patients which are indistinguishable from those of the uninsured.

This was Edwards’ smart idea as a result of Obamacare. He blew up the budget with idiotic waste while all of our neighboring, competing states were busy getting into the game of building dynamic, growing economies full of manufacturing plants, high-tech businesses, energy, and lots of other things. Meanwhile we sat around waiting for a hurricane because that would bring in federal recovery dollars that Edwards and his pals could use for swag to throw around.

Until COVID came and the swag was never-ending.

Private business? Pshaw. Don’t know, don’t care. These guys actually celebrated when Louisiana businesses were bought out by out-of-state concerns.

If Jim Beam didn’t abjectly suck at his job he would have called that out with fervor and verve. Did he?

Hell, no.

And that’s why we need to move on from him and the retrograde, failed, stupid mentality he represents.

To Louisiana’s legislators, grow some stones and make this state’s tax code look like those of our successful neighbors, don’t listen to the status quo losers who say it can’t be done, and embrace what works. Or don’t, and watch the taxpayers left in Louisiana beat you senseless in the next election for failing to do what you were sent to do.