Finishing Strong

Eight years ago, when I ran for governor, I made a promise to the people of Louisiana that I would not support raising taxes. Now that my last legislative session as governor has concluded, I am proud to say I kept that promise.

Here is what I believe – a smaller government, with lower taxes, fosters growth in the private sector. Raising taxes is bad for families and business. And, I believe the prosperity of our people is more important than the prosperity of government.

Because we have held the line on taxes and reduced the size of government, our private sector economy is stronger than it has ever been. We have more people working and living in Louisiana, with higher incomes, than ever before. Our private sector job growth rate ranks in the top 10 nationally since I was elected in 2008.

This legislative session, in addition to keeping our promise to the taxpayer and putting our private sector first, we passed our eighth balanced budget in a row while reducing the size of state government by nearly three percent. The budget continues the trend of making smart reductions to the size of government, while strengthening the state’s health care system and protecting higher education. This budget also reduces the reliance on one-time funding and increases the amount of recurring revenue, ensuring more stable state budgets for years to come.

Despite making reductions and shrinking government, we were able to protect our top priorities and invest in key areas like higher education, K-12 education, healthcare and public safety – all without raising taxes.

This includes investing $2.3 billion to fund higher education across our state. That includes more than $265 million for the TOPS program, which is an increase over last year’s TOPS investment by about $15.2 million. This will ensure more of our students have the opportunity to earn a college degree right here at home.

We also made investments in K-12 education, increasing funding by $84 million, which includes maintaining funding for the Louisiana Scholarship Program so that thousands of students who have escaped failing schools can continue their education in schools that better suit their academic needs.

I’m also proud that we worked with parents and legislators and took back local control of education from the federal government, putting us on a path to get out of Common Core.

And in healthcare, we increased funding for health services and gave our medical schools more resources to train physicians. We committed more than $53 million for state partner hospitals around Louisiana to strengthen the delivery of health care for our people.

Lastly, I’m proud that we protected religious liberty through an executive order. This executive order prevents the state from discriminating against those who hold deeply held religious beliefs about marriage being between one man and one woman.

Indeed, it was a great session and we got a lot done for the people of Louisiana. But let me be clear – we will not stop working.

As I’ve always said, we will run out of time before we run out of things to do.