A crack in the budget plan?

While our legislators are touring our state immersed in re-election mantra consisting of how they successfully solved the most recent $1.6 billion budget deficit crisis, there are indicators that a crack may already be developing in their grand plan.  Last week Jindal imposed a state hiring freeze. He ordered executive branch agencies to freeze non-essential spending and hiring, and banned any spending on travel, operating services, supplies, professional services, acquisitions, and major repairs in the executive branch.  

While I’m all in favor of cutting government spending, past experience has shown that Jindal never engages in such behavior unless something is seriously amiss.

Even State Treasurer, John Kennedy, finds the timing of such an edict, immediately following the close of the legislative session, to be quite odd.  His response to this latest Jindal maneuver was, “I think there's a very real possibility that we're going to have mid-year budget cuts, (and) I think the budget is very precariously balanced.  In fact, I'm not sure it's balanced at all."

If the legislator-created budget starts to unravel BEFORE re-election time, it would be a political disaster for our esteemed representatives, but hopefully serve as a wakeup call to the voters of this state and cause them to pause before putting these same folks back in our state capital for another four years.

Let’s remember that our present legislators had 7 years to prevent this mess and supported Jindal in his “kick the can down the road’ budget policies.  In fact, they did that yet AGAIN with their latest budget which creates an over $1 billion short fall for the next fiscal year which begins July 1, 2016.

It’s time for sweeping changes at our state capital.  Don’t let candidates run unopposed and get automatically re-elected.  This is already happening in the Hammond area.  Step up and get involved!