re: You're Governor of Louisiana, what do you do to bring jobs & improve economy?

If you have to use incentives, you’ve already lost. In order to incentivize, you must first take from those who labor without any incentive to do so. Only by creating a level and firtile environment for business can sustainable growth be fostered long term. Incentives are just lipstick on a pig, and the companies recruited by them will just as soon leave for the next place with slightly shinier lips.

You have to understand pot’s role. Most creative types smoke weed. Creative types are more likely to start businesses from scratch that grow into successful businesses. The money from pot sales goes into the public school systems resulting in more creative and educated workers. The cycle feeds itself just like Louisiana’s entitlement culture. Federal payments for Medicaid is 40% of Louisiana’s budget.

Pot is a tiebreaker that helped tens of thousands of the most creative and innovative workers choose to relocate to Denver, and those folks created a massive economic boom resulting in more money than ever for their governments to try and squander.

Not legalizing pot is nothing but an unnecessary handcuff on a region’s economic potential. This is of course not even counting the fact that legalization is desired by the overwhelming majority of the electorate and only remains illegal due to politicians and special interests fighting over who gets to profit from it. At least the politicians settle their disputes at the legislature instead of gunning people down in the streets like the cartels do.

Don’t think of legalizing pot as a low priority item. Think of it more as low-hanging fruit that’s an easy sell to the electorate that has immediately noticeably returns. Remember, politics are all about selling your vision in 4-8 Year increments. A 10 year plan is all well and good, but if there’s no positive noticeable results in year 3, you’re getting voted out of office and the plan goes bye bye with it. Pot, much like ending legacy lawsuits, is an easy layup that you can deliver instant gratification to your constituents with while longer term investments still need more time to bare fruit.

A sustainable farm does not grow only one crop. They have many different crops that can be harvested year round for a consistent supply of income and food while also rotating them to prevent soil exhaustion. One must think about political agendas the same way. Big changes to education rarely make noticeable differences until 5-10 years after implementation. It’s great to plant timber, but you have to have something else to feed yourself with while you wait 20 years to be able to harvest it. You need some wins along the way or else you’ll never make it long enough to see the big long term goals come to fruition.

-Build new I-10 bridge in LC
-Build loop around BR with new Mississippi River bridge, widen I-10 to 6 lanes across the state, 8-10 lanes across BR, NO, and Laffy
-Complete I-49 South and the Shreveport connector, give us a complete interstate from NO to Kansas City

I know...would never happen.

The only way a governor would be successful here is if he resigned.

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Don’t think of legalizing pot as a low priority item.

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It's absolutely not low priority.

Its nearly as important as addressing the violent crime problems and education problems in our state IMO.

No Covid restrictions
Fix the issues of high crime
Improve School systems
Fix all roads and highway systems
NO never-ending government spending to people to lazy to go back to work
Better building infrastructures

This is all off the top of my head, which John Bel Cock Sucker is too dumb to figure out anyway.

Fixing infrastructure takes money. Legal weed, when after taxes is priced competitively with street weed, takes money out of the hands of cartels and criminals and puts that money into the hands of entrepreneurs and government agencies. You cannot build the hard infrastructure needed to succeed without money. Legalizing recreational weed cultivation and sales creates an immediate boost of cash that can be used to make the real major needed reforms easier to pull off.

Louisiana’s corrupt culture has one weakness, a popular governor that the corrupt class cannot control. With so much power coalesced in the governor’s office, a reform-minded governor has so much more leverage to “drain the swamp” than does a U.S. president. The key is this governor has to be willing to use that power and push all the right buttons while also maintaining a popular mandate. With the line-item veto, the governor has a budgetary guillotine over the head of every mayor and legislator.

Great post. Legalizing pot would slow brain drain or stop it all together. The people leaving Louisiana are college educated. That is your biggest problem. College kids fresh out of school like there herbs. They like to party. Why not retain them and take in some of their tax dollars by making herb legal and collecting just a little revenue off of it. Not much you don't want to overburden with red tape. You also collect tax dollars from tourists. And believe it or not there is such a thing as pot tourism.

Pot there isn't much to clean up... But beer cans and solo cups everywhere = trashy.
Keep enjoying your PBR though and throw it out your truck on the way home from the plant. Don't forget to toss that empty can of Copenhagen too.

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. In 2018, the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the state administers of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), dramatically increased the number of people removed from the program because of the work requirement.

In the six months from October 2017 through March 2018, the state removed an average of 356 people a month from food stamps for failure to meet the work requirement.

From April through October of this year, the average increased 20-fold — to nearly 8,000 a month.

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The work requirements were passed in 1996 and require adults between the ages of 18 and 49, who are not disabled and who have no dependents, to work at least 20 hours a week or be engaged in some sort of education or work training. The food stamp program refers to these people as ABAWDs, short for able-bodied adults without dependents.

The law gives them three months to meet the work requirement or lose the benefit. During the Great Recession, the federal government relaxed those rules, waiving the time limit for entire states or parts of states hard hit by higher unemployment.

Georgia was one of the states with a statewide waiver, but over the past couple of years, the state has gradually removed them for counties across the state as the economy has improved and unemployment has fallen. But another factor driving the dramatic increase in removals of able-bodied adults is the state’s new social benefits data management system — known as “Georgia Gateway” — which has given DFCS officials a clearer picture into the lives of food stamp recipients.

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we are all just ABAWDS