We got a good chuckle out of this – the “Invest In Louisiana” people, who for some reason rebranded themselves after being the Louisiana Budget Project for most of their time in existence, put out a daily email which is essentially the Hard Left narrative on state policy, and it’s usually a hoot. But today’s missive is one for the books.

It’s responding to a forecast by Dr. Loren Scott, the LSU economist who’s sort of Louisiana’s own Stephen Moore or Art Laffer. Scott is usually pretty good at spotting trends, but sometimes he can be a bit of a cheerleader for the state’s economy. We don’t think that’s a bad thing – after all, Louisiana could use some economic cheerleaders. Scott says Louisiana is primed to add as many as 55,000 jobs over the next couple of years, and he thinks Baton Rouge is going to be the prime mover in that figure – though clearly the construction of Starbase Louisiana is going to factor into the rankings soon (maybe not before the end of 2028, though; we’ll see).

Anyway, here’s what the Invest In Louisiana folks say about that…

A jobs boom* 

An uptick in construction activity brought on by massive investments in steel mills, data centers and a spaceport is expected to bring 55,000 new jobs to Louisiana over the next two years. At least that’s the word from the eternally optimistic Loren Scott, whose annual Louisiana Economic Forecast was released on Tuesday. As The Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate’s Tim Boone reports, the Baton Rouge region leads the way in total new jobs, while the Lake Charles region expects to add the most jobs on a percentage basis.

A continued decline in convention business post-COVID and the completion of Venture Global’s Plaquemines Parish LNG terminal will cause job growth to slow down in metro New Orleans. The Crescent City is forecast to add 6,200 jobs over the next two years, a 1.3% growth rate. That would rank New Orleans ninth in terms of growth among the state’s 10 metro areas.

But as The Data Center reported last spring, big private investments don’t always deliver for local communities. A decade ago it was an energy boom, led by new LNG terminals, that was supposed to usher in a new age of prosperity. Instead Louisiana’s job growth continued to trail the rest of the country, while environmental and health conditions worsened.

A decade ago, Southeast Louisiana stood on the threshold of what appeared to be a generational economic boom. Billions in petrochemical and manufacturing investment promised tens of thousands of job openings. That promise has gone unfulfilled. While capital and billions of dollars in tax subsidies did flow into refineries, chemical plants, and LNG facilities, job growth has failed to materialize

Bah humbug!

The energy boom led by new LNG terminals didn’t materialize into lots of jobs over the last decade, huh? Wonder why that was.

Oh, yeah! Maybe the fact that the Biden administration came in with a ban on LNG exports that lasted two years in the middle of the construction of a bunch of those terminals. had something to do with it. Funny how that didn’t make it into Invest In Louisiana’s analysis. Thanks to that delay, many of those terminals aren’t as far along in their construction as they otherwise would have been.

An LNG export terminal isn’t a huge job engine. It’s not small, either, but this isn’t like a car plant. Once it’s built, much of what it does is automated and mechanical in ways which make a whole lot of human labor unnecessary. You’re running a control room and you’re out checking on everything, but an LNG terminal isn’t a manufacturing plant.

It does, however, require a ton of maintenance, just like a data center does, and that means the contractors who service LNG terminals tend to get lots of work and hire lots of people for pretty well-paying jobs.

And the companies who operate those LNG terminals tend to spend a whole lot of money in the communities where the terminals are. A perfect example – you’ll notice that Venture Global and Woodside Energy are both big corporate sponsors of LSU athletics, and a couple of years ago you’d probably never heard of either one.

The other thing which was completely missed in this “analysis” is what happened in Louisiana over that disappointing decade.

Gosh, whatever could that be?

Well, I don’t know. Was it the fact that a leftist Democrat who believes all of the same crap the Invest In Louisiana people do was the governor here for eight years out of those 10?

Hmmm.

Maybe it was. Especially considering that when John Bel Edwards took office, he immediately inflated the state’s budget by two billion dollars, declared a “fiscal cliff” and crisis as a result, and said that if he couldn’t get the largest tax increase in the history of the state he’d have to shut down college football in Louisiana. And those stupid pressure tactics worked on a weak quasi-Republican state legislature so well that Edwards got pretty much everything he wanted.

And the business taxes he laid onto the state’s economy absolutely crippled it. Edwards all but destroyed oil and gas exploration in the state, he bled the ports dry of investment, his inventory taxes crushed manufacturers… Edwards enriched the state’s public sector on a scale that would have made Huey Long blush, and Louisiana’s real economy groaned and starved.

Meanwhile, the rest of the South boomed, and left us in the dust.

Edwards oversaw Louisiana’s outmigration outstripping our in-migration every year he was in office. His tax and regulatory policies crippled the state’s economy, and if that wasn’t enough he did more to lock Louisiana down for COVID than any other Southern governor did, which exacerbated the problem.

It isn’t that private investment into industrial plants doesn’t create jobs. It’s that you can tax an economy to death. And while there were incentives brought to bear to get those investments here, in and of themselves they aren’t going to prop up a dead economy. You have to give that economy room to grow on its own as well.

And by the way, John Bel Edwards inherited a massive pipeline of economic investment when he took office. By the time he left office and Jeff Landry was inaugurated, that pipeline had gone more or less dry. Now it’s full again.

So no, it’s not that private investment doesn’t fuel an economy. It’s that “public” investment, meaning building the welfare and bureaucratic state on the back of private industry, will kill it.

John Bel Edwards proved that pretty conclusively and the “Invest In Louisiana” clowns were with him every step of the way. Now that Louisiana has more people working than ever before and the economic tide is clearly rising, they want to play Scrooge.

Sure, fellas. Whatever you say.