re: What ever happened to the signature/recall JBE grass roots effort?

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So are there any solutions that would work for southern Louisiana ? I am not an economist so I don’t exactly how you improve education besides throwing dollars at it every year.

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Charter schools seem to be working in NOLA, but not so much elsewhere.

I think the best way to fix it is by following Mississippi’s lead and focusing more on literacy in primary school. You’re not allowed to advance to 6th grade in Mississippi if you cannot read well. Studies have shown that students who don’t read well by the time they hit 8th grade tend to become discouraged, then disruptive, then drop out entirely. If you cannot read, everything gets way harder.

Mississippi did this about 8 or 10 years ago and went from dead last in education to mid teens in rankings with nearly identical demographics and less per pupil funding than Louisiana.

The next issue is taxation. We have to find a way to eliminate our state inventory and income tax systems. These are the areas that are so complex that they scare off investors, yet are so abusable, that large existing companies here don’t end up paying anything, and often get money back from the government.

The third issue is really a structural one. One would think that having nearly all power in the state consolidated at the state level would make it easier for businesses to know the rules to do business here, but it’s somehow worse due to our corrupt bureaucracy being more about sheltering locals from competitors than about fostering investment. This attitude trickles down to corrupt and/or incompetent local permitting offices and inspectors who either find any excuse to deny/shut down someone, extort entrepreneurs for bribes, pass off shoddy work as passing without a real inspection, or are just so slow that business basically get suffocated by delays and run out of runway before they can open.