re: Yeah thanks JBE for the honesty

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When Bobby was elected in 2008, there were 93,500 state employees. An article in the Times in 2014 stated he had reduced that number down to 62,000 employees, thus SAVING the state about $1B annually. Granted... not sure where all that money was spent in the past few years, but imagine the shape we would be in today if he hadn't cut all of those employees. JBE could be saying he inherited about a $5B deficit. 

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This is all smoke and mirrors. A large portion of the state employee positions that were cut under Jindal were already vacant positions, so in other words a live breathing person earning a salary didn't actually lose a job. A large portion of the "savings" you speak of were essentially potential money being saved and not real money as those positions were not filled by an actual person being paid a salary.

Concerning where that money was spent, one thing that many people don't realize is that you can cut all the state employee jobs you want, but that doesn't cut the work they were hired to do. The result is the state many times is left to contract this work out to private industry, which ends up costing the state much more then if the work was completed in house. It's good for the private industry (state contracts are pretty much guaranteed money) but not so much for the state. So basically, cutting state employees does not always equate cutting deficit. I think Treasurer Kennedy has even mentioned that contracts the state has with the private industry need to be reviewed.