We’ll apologize for dragging our readers through the muck that is the Louisiana Illuminator, a leftist propaganda rag funded by the Usual Suspect out-of-state Soros-y foundations, but the Illuminator did publish the story on the intentional failure of the Louisiana Senate to act on meaningful tax reform in this year’s legislative fiscal session.

This might infuriate you. Be warned.

A package of legislation that would have included tax cuts and an overhaul of state budget laws has stalled in the Louisiana Senate and is unlikely to regain momentum before lawmakers end their 2025 legislative session next week.

The package includes a proposed constitutional amendment that would have let lawmakers take $3 billion from an emergency savings account and free up money to pay for income and sales tax cuts, among other things.

That proposal, sponsored by Rep. Julie Emerson, R-Carencro, received overwhelming bipartisan support from House lawmakers last month but has been sidelined until next year, according to Sen. Franklin Foil, R-Baton Rouge.

Foil, who chairs the Senate Committee on Revenue and Fiscal Affairs, said in an interview Sunday he and other senior lawmakers met with Emerson and Gov. Jeff Landry last week to discuss several fiscal bills being proposed this session.

“[After] our last meeting that we had with the governor, I don’t believe that we’ll be bringing that amendment through this session,” Foil said, adding that Emerson’s package of fiscal bills had him worried that it was all “too much, too fast.”

Senate leaders are reluctant to green light another tax overhaul before they even see the results of the one they completed in a special session last fall. In November, lawmakers lowered and flattened both individual and corporate income taxes and increased the sales tax.

Because it’s the Illuminator, the status quo gang that Foil represents who were responsible for killing Emerson’s tax cuts are advertised as “fiscal conservatives.” How accurate do you think that characterization is?

House Bill 667 would have cut Louisiana’s new 3% flat income tax to 2.75% and authorized a higher deduction for taxpayers age 65 and older. The bill was contingent on the amendment’s approval, and senators were concerned with an analysis from the Legislative Fiscal Office that estimated the measure could deprive the state of more than a billion dollars in revenue over a five-year period beginning in 2027. The Fiscal Office also stressed the difficulty in coming up with any estimate due to the lack of data reflecting the tax changes that took place in November.

“We didn’t even hear the income tax bill because that’s primarily what it did,” Foil said. “It was going to reduce income taxes even more than what we did during the special session in the fall. Many of us up here would like to see income taxes reduced, but we need to do it in a responsible way, and…we didn’t want to accelerate deficits for us either until we see how the finances level out.”

Another cut was in House Bill 578, which would have lowered the state sales tax from 5% to 4.75%. The rest of the bill restores some minor sales tax exemptions removed from state law during the special tax session last fall. The Senate Revenue & Fiscal Affairs Committee advanced an amended version of the bill Sunday that no longer contains the sales tax rate cut. It is now pending a vote in the Senate Finance Committee.

Another part of Emerson’s package is a measure that would pull $2 billion from the Revenue Stabilization Fund and stick it into a separate savings account, and then take another $1 billion from that fund to pay down debt and save the state millions of dollars a year in interest payments.

Foil’s statement about cutting taxes in a “responsible way,” which the leftists at the Illuminator think makes him out to be a “conservative,” is laughable.

You want to be a “conservative,” Senator Foil? We’ll help you out with that – the people of this state tell you time and again, in countless ways, that we’re too heavily taxed and the money being taken from us is used poorly and for exceptionally meager benefit to the public weal. Your job isn’t to try to convince us that you’re being “responsible” with the state’s fisc – nobody thinks that’s happening.

Instead, it’s to get as much of our money back into our own hands as possible so that we can create things with those resources.

“Conservatives” understand this. Conservatives see tax cuts as an enabling, dynamic piece of policy which do a couple of things.

First, they actually generate more revenue down the line because an economy not burdened with excessive taxation tends to grow pretty rapidly. And economic growth has the fun effect of making public sector welfare expenses less necessary; economic activity means more jobs, meaning more families generating larger incomes, meaning more self-sufficiency and less government dependence, meaning less need for government.

We absolutely refuse to embrace these truths in our state. We have bureaucratic drones plugging numbers into a first-grade Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and reading off results which say that if you cut taxes by x-amount that you’ll get y-revenue. It’s static scoring, not dynamic scoring, and those numbers never end up being all that accurate.

So you can’t get rid of the state income tax because the state can’t “afford” to.

Franklin Foil isn’t a conservative. He’s a status quo politician. He proved that by killing Emerson’s tax package.

When what should have happened was that it should have passed, and then the state’s budget ought to be cut to accommodate that passage – for the short period of time it would take for economic growth to absorb the “losses” from the tax cuts.

If you’re actually conservative that would be your mindset.

But that’s not what we have in the Louisiana Senate. We have status quo politicians too lazy and timid to venture forth and make Louisiana a place worth doing business in.

And the Louisiana Illuminator calls that “fiscal conservatism.”

We don’t know if you’re infuriated. If you are, though, believe us. You are not alone.