BOBBY JINDAL'S RUBBISH

Now that the dust has settled and Louisiana is implementing Governor Jindal’s new state operating budget that he was able to push through both legislative houses relatively intact, let’s see how things are stacking up:

Education:  When Bobby Jindal first ran for governor one of his main talking points throughout the campaign was how he was going to stem the flow of Louisiana’s brightest and talented students leaving our state to attend other universities throughout the nation and not returning to Louisiana upon graduation.

He has addressed this issue succinctly by cutting aid to education so drastically that now we rank behind one of the poorest countries in the world, Haiti, in the percent of our state budget spent on higher education.

Haiti spends 13% of its budget on higher education while Louisiana now spends less than 11%.  And don’t think that old Mississippi will save the day for us because they devote 17.7% of their budget to that area.

As one editorial columnist, Dayne Sherman, recently put it, “Ole Miss might not be able to beat the Tigers in football, but they’re beating us in academics like a crazed farmer whipping a rented plow horse.”

This year’s budget which began July 1^st has cut another $66 million from colleges and universities. This is in addition to the cuts imposed in previous fiscal years.

For example, over the last four years, Southeastern Louisiana University alone has been cut roughly $40 million or nearly 50% of its state funding.  This fiscal year, the LSU system was cut an additional $29 million, with the Baton Rouge campus taking a $19 million hit.  Let's not even talk about the cuts at the smaller colleges like Nicholls, UNO, ULL and Southern.

This raping of educational funding occurring at a time when an affiliate of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, the Institute for a Competitive Workforce, issued a report giving Louisiana, an ‘F’ for its four year colleges and universities in their ability to retain and graduate their students within a reasonable time. The report says that Louisiana’s four year schools rank in the BOTTOM 10 states in the nation in student retention and completion.

Overall, in the state, funding to colleges and universities has been cut $420 million dollars or 26% during Bobby Jindal’s reign as governor.

And we weren’t spending that much to begin with!

Medical Services:  The hypocrisy of Bobby Jindal really shines through in this area.  During the past legislative session when a group of fiscally conservative legislators tried to prevent Bobby and his crew from using one time monies in the next fiscal year’s proposed budget that began July 1st, they were bombarded by emails and TV infomercials put in place by Bobby’s hatchet men scaring the public about how devastating the cuts would be to the care of the mentally ill and sick in our state.  They professed that any health care services provided to these groups would be non-existent if these legislators pursued their budgetary plans.

Bobby won and the legislators backed off and approved his initial budget.

However, when word of a cut of $860 million to Louisiana’s health care system (more than ten times what our state legislators were considering) arose due to proposed budgetary cuts to Medicaid at the federal level, Jindal was urged by both Republican and Democratic leaders in the state, and our representatives in Congress to personally intervene by calling some of the highest ranking leaders in the U.S. Congress to reconsider this action. 

Jindal’s response was total silence!  He made no such call because he didn’t want to hurt his chances of a V.P. nod by pushing back against his own party’s highest ranking congressional leaders.  Both Senators Vitter and Landrieu were outrage by his complacency.

Congress approved the cuts and Bobby addressed the issue by releasing the following statement, “At the end of the day, Louisiana will have a balanced budget that doesn’t raise taxes on families or businesses.”

Please remember that Jindal was one of a handful of governors that had already refused the additional Medicaid funds that would be available in 2014 under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Well, as Jindal claims his budget doesn’t raise taxes but it produces disastrous results for Louisiana’s 750,000 uninsured residents. 

Apparently, Louisianians who suffer from mental illness or other health conditions, and are too poor or infirm to get help are not worth a damn according to Governor Jindal.

One can measure a people, a state, or a nation by how it treats its poor and elderly, its sick and dying, and its homeless and broken souls.

Thanks to Governor Bobby Jindal and his legislative puppets, for the present, Louisiana is failing at all levels in these areas of human decency.

And unfortunately there appears to be no hope in the foreseeable future for Louisiana that Bobby might leave us soon for a V.P. bid.  His college dabbling in exorcism along with his recent TV interview comparing Obamacare to Mardi Gras and his infamous rambling response to Obama’s State of the Union Address in 2009 have permanently closed that gate.

Well, I’ve only looked at two of the major areas affected by King Bobby’s new state budget.  I could look at some additional ones, but I don't want this to be so long that you stop reading.

I will close with this fact.  If for one minute you think that none of this affects you, for you're neither in need of seeking an education, nor poor and sickly, I can assure you that all citizens of Louisiana at some level will sooner or later have a personal experience with Jindal’s fiscal atrocities.