re: Legislative session opens today. It will be a disaster.

quote:

---

Why do they need to propose cuts? Let's just leave the budget at a standstill.

---

Even at a standstill, you still have increases if you want to keep things the same. For example, more public school students due to natural student growth. So you have to allow for that, even if the per pupil rate stays the same.

Or, you freeze total spending as it is, and as new kids come into the system, they have to just absorb the cost. that's fine too... but that's, economically spending, is a cut.

Louisiana doesn't really use baseline budgeting, which is what the feds use. Here, a cut is really a cut... unlike the feds, where baseline budgeting means a cut is really still spending more, just not as much more.

And even with a standstill budget, you still have the temp sales taxes rolling off, which is going to mean either actual cuts or new revenues. That's a year away so technically it doesn't have to be handled this session, but it can't be handled in the next regular session either, so we would have to do a special.