You’ve just got to laugh at Helena Moreno, don’t you?

Don’t complain, Helena. You’ve been asking for this job for years, and now it’s about to be yours. Congratulations.

Moreno, the former WDSU-TV anchor, ex-state representative, current New Orleans city councilmember and mayor-elect in the Big Easy, is the leading supplicant for the city as it seeks a massive $125 million bailout from the Louisiana State Bond Commission to cover the gaping hole its horrific fiscal management has left.

You’d want to have some sympathy for Moreno. This is a heck of a way to have to kick off a term as mayor.

Except she’s been on the city council down there for a good while. She’s been involved in the pathetic fiscal management of New Orleans all the way to the hilt. This problem is nearly as much of her making as failed outgoing mayor LaToya Cantrell, who is in Brian Kelly checkout mode given her federal indictment problems.

No city should find itself $125 million in the hole absent an earthquake or a hurricane or some other catastrophic act of God. Which was the message Gov. Jeff Landry sent yesterday when he came out not only against the idea of the State Bond Commission floating New Orleans that loan but suggested it’s time to put the city under the state’s fiscal management.

Over the past 20 months, both I and the Legislature have diligently worked to establish fiscal stability in this State. We have implemented tax reform, reduced insurance costs, and historically revitalized this economy.

It is imperative that the @CityOfNOLA address its financial…

— Governor Jeff Landry (@LAGovJeffLandry) October 28, 2025

The full quote from the governor:

Over the past 20 months, both I and the Legislature have diligently worked to establish fiscal stability in this State. We have implemented tax reform, reduced insurance costs, and historically revitalized this economy. It is imperative that the @CityOfNOLA address its financial matters promptly. I urge @House_LRLD and @LASenateGOP to deny the city’s request to accumulate debt on the backs of its citizens. I am calling on @LATreasury, @AGLizMurrill, and @LALegisAuditor to convene an emergency meeting of the Fiscal Review Committee. They must utilize all necessary measures to thoroughly review the city’s fiscal affairs and, if deemed necessary, appoint a fiscal administrator.

There could be a little bit of gamesmanship to this. Landry hasn’t endorsed state representative Julie Emerson for the Senate race next year but there are a lot of people who think he will, and Emerson is on the Bond Commission. State Treasurer John Fleming chairs it.

So if Landry comes out against issuing the bailout and Emerson leads the charge against it, Fleming is put in a position of either being the bad guy who rebuffs New Orleans and watches the city burn, or he’s a RINO who bent over for them. That would be the dynamic in such a scenario.

Some have brought that up as being part of what Landry is doing. But we don’t think that’s the story here.

The real story is a lot more substantial than that.

Let’s remember fundamentally what happened here which causes New Orleans to be seeking that bailout.

Terrible management, obviously. But also, New Orleans bet big on hosting the Super Bowl and getting a massive hit from tourism to come out of that.

And it didn’t come.

Partially because of that Muslim terrorist who murdered those people in the French Quarter running his truck through Bourbon Street on New Year’s Eve, which scared away some of the folks who might otherwise come to the Big Easy for Super Bowl week. But partially because at the end of the day, New Orleans just isn’t a high-end tourist place anymore.

Which isn’t to say that tourism has dried up in New Orleans. There was this…

New Orleans played host to more than 19 million visitors in 2024, a near-record number that tourism officials say signals a recovery from four sluggish years following the coronavirus pandemic.

According to a study conducted by hospitality firm MMGY Global, the nearly 19.1 million visitors that came New Orleans last year represented a 6.4% increase over the year before and only the second time on record that the city has attracted more than 19 million visitors.

The other time was in 2019, when the city’s visitor count topped 19.7 million.

“This is a real high point for us,” said Walt Leger, III, president and CEO of New Orleans & Co., which commissioned the recent study. “When you think about where we were five years ago, it certainly signals an improvement and success, so we are happy.”

So you’ve got a super-vibrant tourist industry, and tourism is about as high-tax an industry as you can base your economy on, and yet New Orleans is dirt broke and begging the state for a bailout.

Isn’t that strange? Something doesn’t compute.

And I’ll tell you what that is. I’m going to say the same thing Conrad Appel, who has been saying it for years here and elsewhere (Conrad writes this morning that the Governor is correct in opposing the bailout), will say.

Which is that New Orleans shouldn’t have put itself in a position where tourism is the basis of its economy.

I haven’t traveled a ton of late. I used to do it a lot. One of the things I noticed when I did, though, is that the places which were big tourist traps with not much else going on were generally dirt-poor places.

And that makes sense, when you think about it.

The guy who owns the hotel or the restaurant or the bar, or whatever other place you’re going to visit and spend money in on your trip, will do OK. The people who work for him? Most of them make just more than diddly poo.

Hotel maids. Bus boys. Bell boys. Barbacks. Those are minimum wage jobs. Wait staff, bartenders and concierges might do a little better, but you don’t get rich working at a tourist place.

One of the biggest problems New Orleans has is too many of its citizens don’t make any money. New Orleans has lots of people who don’t work at all, and that’s a problem, but it’s the fact that the city’s working class is a lot of minimum wage people barely scraping by rather than folks who have more middle-class jobs.

Conrad talks about this a lot when he goes off on the economic rationale for a city’s existence, but New Orleans became a city of significance because it was the port at, or near, the mouth of the Mississippi. And the geographical advantage of that location meant New Orleans would be one of the world’s busiest and most important ports.

Which it always has been, and still sort of is.

If you have a busy and important port, and you manage it properly, you’re going to have a whole ecosystem of economic activity. A port needs lots of warehousing and storage, and that’s an industry which will have decent jobs associated with it. You’ll have trucking. You’ll have a financial industry. Probably shipbuilding. You should be able to develop some manufacturing, because access to the port means manufacturers can get supplied easily and they can get their products to market at advantageous cost.

And there was a time New Orleans had all of those things. Not in the volume, perhaps, that New York or Boston or Los Angeles had them, but then again before the Civil War New Orleans was considered one of the three or four most economically important cities in the Western hemisphere and the port was the reason. It was also the reason the British sent an invading army to take New Orleans even though they were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent with us to end the War of 1812. They wanted to have boots on the ground in New Orleans as a major negotiation asset.

But stupid communist policies will dry up a port. And that has happened in New Orleans.

Some of this involves the increasing intermodality of the logistics industry. You can ship a lot of products by air that you used to have to put on a boat, and we trade more with Asia now than Europe, so the ports in Southern California are naturally going to assume more volume.

But on the other hand, all the fruit – bananas, in particular – which used to come in from Central America through the Port of New Orleans now goes to Gulfport. New Orleans could have kept up with the Joneses and built a cold storage facility, but didn’t. And the container ship traffic largely goes through Houston now because New Orleans didn’t keep up with that either.

Not to mention that when you tax inventory, as we stupidly do in Louisiana, people don’t want to store things with you.

New Orleans, particularly after Katrina came in and cleared out a substantial part of the city’s less-desirable geography, could have revitalized itself as an intermodal transportation and logistics hub. The Ninth Ward and New Orleans East should have become vast industrial parks with big-ol’ five-foot-high concrete slabs that warehouses sat on, insuring no floods would damage the billions of dollars of merchandise being processed through the various commercial entities handling our massive international trade.

Instead, New Orleans is one of the nation’s busiest ports by volume. Not by worth. A bunch of grain comes down the river and gets put on oceangoing freighters, and tons of slag iron and other raw materials come in. The container ships mostly go west, the perishables mostly go east.

And the port doesn’t feed any other industries.

And instead of longshoremen, forklift drivers and warehousemen making 60-80 grand a year, we have hotel maids making 25-30 grand a year. That’s what you get when you run off real industry and commerce and try to make yourself rich as a tourist trap.

I’m not saying tourism is illegitimate. I am saying that tourism is what you do after you’ve built the real stuff. It isn’t the real stuff and it isn’t a substitute for it.

Which New Orleans, and its politicians’ desperate begging for bailouts for the city’s stupid communist government, is proof of.

Hopefully Landry’s admonition to the Bond Commission carries the day and Helena Moreno and the rest of the stupid communists in charge of New Orleans are forced to come up with a different paradigm of government. Short of catastrophe they aren’t going to depart from their current destructive path, so let’s get that over with sooner rather than later.