By Kenneth Cooper
The Louisiana state budget is an abstraction, a series of dollar signs and digits existing on a computer screen or piece of paper. Taken as a whole, it’s unfathomable in scope and consolidated into a figure that’s innumerable. Try imagining $25 billion, the physical amount, not the number. The first thing that probably comes to mind is an endless stack of money, an image having little to do with reality. That’s how our governors and state legislators have come to think about it.
“A million here, a million there,” so said Lil Wayne in A Milli, a song that will probably go down as one of his greatest hits. It’s a verse about how frivolous money can become once you’ve amassed enough of it. Every year we citizens are legally obligated to help our state government amass a fortune, about $8 billion in tax revenue. In return, they’ve amassed a disregard for how they spend that money.
Looking through the state budget, one of the first things you’ll notice, besides its length, is that every commission or department has at least a multi-million or multi-billion dollar budget. How the costs have gotten to be that expensive and continue to do so is not even a question. It’s a given. If you were to ask the governor what the State Racing Commission spends $12 million on, he’d probably have to get back to you. Ask why it costs $2 billion to have a Department of Higher Education, and you most likely would never get an answer.
Instead, the clearest look citizens get to a detailed breakdown of the budget comes every spring when legislators and governors subject them to an annual series of hostage negotiations. Simply asking citizens for more money has proven to be ineffective, so the alternative scenario usually plays out like this: some state official, usually the governor, will appear on TV and basically say, give me a certain amount of money or I’ll close down a hospital. When a hospital is not being held hostage, it’s your grandmother’s subsidy for medicine, your child’s after-school program, or a teacher’s job at a university.
Other times, depending on your tax bracket, you’ll be asked to help out with the negotiations. That scenario usually plays out like this: some state official, usually the governor, will appear on TV and say, help me extract a large amount of money from the pockets of these rich people or I’ll shut down the TOPS program.
In both scenarios, the focus is shifted away from the money being spent and onto other things like class warfare or preventing some dire situation.
This year’s hostage negotiations produced an agreement for citizens to hand over more than a billion dollars via two years’ worth of higher sales taxes. The three-week special session produced a few hundred million more.
Future negotiations are already in the making. There’s talk of a can being kicked down a dead-ended road and a fiscal cliff we’re all set to fall off. One of the solutions so far seems to be collecting an extra $900 million by eliminating a federal tax deduction. For their part, the Republican Party has been questioning the size, cost, and scope of government, but they have the terrible habit of doing so mainly on the backs of poor people.
So that leaves citizens grasping at an abstraction, one slowly being revealed each year through piecemealed emergencies. Meanwhile, legislators kick cans while the cost of government keeps rising. Why worry about a million here or a million there when you can always get a million more from businesses and citizens?
Jeff Thomas
Publisher • Opinion Columnist • Licensed General Contractor • Real Estate Appraiser • New Orleans
Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and one of New Orleans’ most direct voices on civic affairs, economic justice, and Louisiana politics. He writes from the intersection of experience and accountability — as a licensed general contractor,a tech company founder and executive with over 30 years experience, and a businessman who has worked across the city’s civic, media, and construction ecosystems for decades.
His Sunday column covers Louisiana legislative politics, insurance discrimination, housing policy, and the forces shaping Black community life in New Orleans and across the state. Thomas writes in the tradition of Black journalists who hold power accountable without apology — building arguments from data, delivering verdicts from evidence, and speaking to Black New Orleans with the directness the moment demands.
He is also the principal of Executive Appraisers Louisiana, an MBE-certified real estate appraisal firm, and EA Inspection Services, LLC, a government inspection services company. Black Source Media is his platform for the civic conversation New Orleans has needed and too rarely had.
Selected Articles by Jeff Thomas
Black Neighborhoods Pay the Highest Insurance Rates in Louisiana. Here’s What They Don’t Want You to Know.
They Didn’t Yell the N-Word. They Went to Law School, Bided Their Time, and Rewrote the Constitution Instead.
Vappie vs. Morrell: Why Does Justice Look Different in New Orleans?
The State Has the Money. New Orleans East Just Needs Them to Use It.
The Failure of Mitch Landrieu
Publisher — Black Source Media
Jeff Thomas
Publisher • Opinion Columnist • Licensed General Contractor • Real Estate Appraiser • New Orleans
Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and one of New Orleans’ most direct voices on civic affairs, economic justice, and Louisiana politics. He writes from the intersection of experience and accountability — as a licensed general contractor,a tech company founder and executive with over 30 years experience, and a businessman who has worked across the city’s civic, media, and construction ecosystems for decades.
His Sunday column covers Louisiana legislative politics, insurance discrimination, housing policy, and the forces shaping Black community life in New Orleans and across the state. Thomas writes in the tradition of Black journalists who hold power accountable without apology — building arguments from data, delivering verdicts from evidence, and speaking to Black New Orleans with the directness the moment demands.
He is also the principal of Executive Appraisers Louisiana, an MBE-certified real estate appraisal firm, and EA Inspection Services, LLC, a government inspection services company. Black Source Media is his platform for the civic conversation New Orleans has needed and too rarely had.
Selected Articles by Jeff Thomas
Black Neighborhoods Pay the Highest Insurance Rates in Louisiana. Here’s What They Don’t Want You to Know.
They Didn’t Yell the N-Word. They Went to Law School, Bided Their Time, and Rewrote the Constitution Instead.
Vappie vs. Morrell: Why Does Justice Look Different in New Orleans?
The State Has the Money. New Orleans East Just Needs Them to Use It.
The Failure of Mitch Landrieu