Weighing a Run in 2016, Jindal Faces Big Budget Shortfall
Source: The New York Times
BATON ROUGE, La. — In recent weeks, the office of Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has issued news releases about the “mindless naïveté” of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the folly of opening diplomatic relations with Cuba and the threat of radical Islam in Europe, prompting a flurry of commentary about what it all might mean to Republican voters in Iowa and South Carolina should Mr. Jindal decide, as has long been expected, to run for president.
But here in the Louisiana capital, there is mostly one topic on everyone’s mind these days, and it is quite distressingly close to home: the fiscal reckoning the state is facing for next year and perhaps for multiple budgets to come.
Louisiana’s budget shortfall is projected to reach $1.6 billion next year and to remain in that ballpark for a while. The downturn in oil prices has undoubtedly worsened the problem, forcing midyear cuts to the current budget. But economists, policy experts and lawmakers of both parties, pointing out that next year’s projected shortfall was well over a billion dollars even when oil prices were riding high, turn to a different culprit: the fiscal policy pushed by the Jindal administration and backed by the State Legislature.
Mr. Jindal’s first term began in 2008 with a heady surplus of around $1 billion, high oil prices and a stream of federal disaster recovery money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. He threw his support behind the largest tax cut in the state’s history and, for a time, had reason to boast about an economy that outperformed the nation’s. But oil prices are fickle, and the recovery money dried up and the recession arrived, if late and in a milder strain than in other states. Since 2010, here as elsewhere, middling has been the new normal.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/us/governors-tactics-at-center-of-louisiana-budget-vortex.html?_r=1
Jindal's Executive Office is doing its part to help Louisiana with the $103 million in midyear budget cuts: It's cutting a whole $10,000 from its budget. In travel expenses.
I sh*t you not.
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Louisiana, Kansas, Wisconsin, and of course the good ole USA (when they're in 'control.') 
Then WE clean it up for them!
