WASHINGTON, DC — In a speech at the National Press Club mainly consisting of calling his rival Donald Trump a series of names, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) held up his own record to Trump’s, saying his work on health care, government spending, and oil drilling make him a strong candidate for the White House.
When asked by reporters about his state’s current budget woes, including a predicted $700 million deficit that Jindal will hand to his successor, the presidential candidate said Thursday that his budget record is “a great example of what we need to do here in D.C.”
“We actually balanced our budget eight years in a row without raising taxes. We cut our budget by 26 percent. We have over 30,000 fewer state bureaucrats than the day I took office,” he said. “Unlike D.C., we don’t play games and kick the can down the road.”
But economists in Louisiana say that’s exactly what the governor has done. While the most recent budget did close a $1.6 billion gap — caused in part by the Jindal Administration’s unwillingness to tax big corporations and the wealthy — it depends heavily on one-time funds that are set to expire, such as recovery money for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and revenue from selling off government land and buildings. Jindal’s balanced budgets have also meant deep cuts to higher education, where spending is down by more than 40 percent since 2008.
At the same time, according to an investigation by The Advocate, Jindal has given more than a billion dollars each year in tax breaks to the film, retail, and fracking industries. The non-partisan Louisiana Budget Project criticized the continuation of these tax breaks, saying the Governor and his legislature “botched reform of the expensive movie subsidy program by passing a proposal that will save money in the short term, but is likely to draw lawsuits and create big financial liabilities for the state in the future.”
Even fellow Republicans like Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne have been slamming Jindal’s tactics. “Our budget has been full of sleights of hand — it’s almost a Ponzi scheme of moving moneys around, one-time money around, to serve recurring needs,” he said.
Yet Jindal stood by his record during his D.C. appearance, characterizing his decision to lay off tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, and other government workers as one that ensured there are “fewer bureaucrats.”
“When you cut the government economy, you can grow the real world, American economy,” he said.
Louisiana’s unemployment rate — 6.6 percent — is currently higher than the national rate of 5.1 percent, due in part to the loss of jobs in the “government economy.”
Meanwhile, some of Jindal’s investments in what he calls the “real world” private sector economy have not paid off — in particular his fervent support of the fossil fuel industry.
“I do support offshore drilling,” Jindal reaffirmed at Thursday’s press conference. “It’s been great for our economy.”
Yet earlier this year, Jindal blamed falling oil prices for his state’s massive budget shortfall. In a state heavily dependent on fossil fuels, state lawmakers yet again made a crucial budget error. In the plan they passed this summer, legislators assumed that oil would stay at $61.70 a barrel, even though prices have been less than $50 a barrel for the last several weeks. This gap alone could mean tens of millions of dollars the state would lose — ensuring Jindal’s successor a daunting challenge in 2017.