What’s in store for La.? Time will tell.

It is interesting that Gov. Kathleen Blanco – not the leadership of the Legislature – announced that there were (barely) enough votes cast by legislators to call off a veto session.

The governor was undoubtedly pleased that, on her way out of the governor’s mansion, she wasn’t the first governor to have such a session called to override gubernatorial vetoes. Once again the “separate but co-equal” branch of government designation for the Louisiana Legislature was proven to be a myth.

Political pork, attendance at a stellar junket, and the desire not to vote on tough issues while campaigning led many of our legislators to resume their role as the governor’s (any governor’s) trained seals.

In her short message calling off the veto session, the governor commended the Legislature for not jeopardizing the “investments” in government passed during the session. The governor’s vision in the recent legislative session – and that of a majority of the Legislature – was that bigger state government was the answer to our problems.

A bigger government was definitely given to us by our state leaders. The state budget exploded to almost $31 billion.

Another 1,500 state employees will swell our employment rolls at a time when the state population has been reduced by as much as 200,000 individuals. Nothing was done to lessen local dependence on funding from Baton Rouge during the last session; in fact, local government funding became even more tied to state government revenues during the session.

The increased spending on state and local government was safe and secure when the legislative session ended.

The targets of the governor’s vetoes were more often than not some of the tax reductions that made it through the process.

The message sent to the taxpayers was clear and direct: Government comes first, and the private sector gets the scraps.

For every dollar in tax cuts that passed in the session and made it past the governor’s veto pen, over $20 in new government spending was enacted. That ratio speaks volumes about the priorities of our elected state officials.

The governor and many members of the Legislature are patting themselves on the back about the “investments” they made in the last session. Time will tell if those expenditures are going to change life as we know it in Louisiana. If more money spent by state government is the answer to the challenges we face in the Bayou State, then our problems should disappear quite soon – considering the record amount we are about to spend.

As fate would have it, this governor and many of these legislators won’t be around to see what grade they made on the test they took in the last session. If the huge increase in state spending simply brings us more of the same old results, they won’t have to answer for their actions. Even more importantly, if they have spent the state into a hole by tying recurring expenditures to revenues that cannot keep up with the huge spending increases, they will have left their successors with a huge mess to clean up.

The worst news for taxpayers may not be the skimpy tax cuts that were passed during the last session. It may well be the pressure for higher taxes that may come soon when recurring revenues are not able to match the record level of recurring expenditures in the state budget.

If the new legislators and the next governor are anything like many of the ones leaving, the continued growth of government will be a higher priority than the financial well-being of the taxpayers.