Is this real? someone get me up to speed on this http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/04/lsu_academic_bankruptcy.html
http://m.lsureveille.com/daily/lsu-...7d6-e93c-11e4-9a06-0f17d23e6ea6.html?mode=jqm Yes it is. Thanks Bobby Jindal, this is what republican politics get you. Louisiana and Kansas are the poster children for why republican tax and spend policies are completely backwards. Keep cutting taxes for the 1 percent and cut funding to education and healthcare to do it.
i can believe it, thats what you do when you are trying to gain national recognition for being a far right conservative. you lie about accomplishments.
It is very real. LSU has suffered budget cuts in each of the last five years with mid-year budget cuts in most years as well. This years cuts will break the back of the institution. Exigency will legally allow LSU to close entire curriculums, even entire departments and possibly entire colleges. It will allow them to fire tenured professors and to not honor contracts. LSU is already suffering a brain drain as professors retire and take jobs at a place that still gives raises. Few new faculty will want to come to LSU under exigency. Few research contracts will be awarded to a university under exigency. Huge layoffs will happen this summer if the cuts go through. I will probably lose my retirement part-time job and have to take a gratis appointment or just walk away. It's a snowballing clusterfuck for LSU and other state colleges and it will take decades to recover, even if further cuts can be avoided. And we owe it all to Bobby Jindal and his GOP sycophants in the legislature. Even though athletics is self-supporting, when LSU has to take giant cuts from academic colleges and virtually eliminate their research departments, it will be very difficult for the athletic department to get permission for any new construction or other gold-plating of athletics. The Republican-dominated legislature is incompetent, blindly ideological, and totally irresponsible. Their job is to balance income and spending but all they know how to do is cut taxes and then suffer unpopular consequences when they take away essential services that people expect from a state--like universities, good roads, hospitals, and vital government services like police, prisons, and coastal protection. Yet they still keep giving huge taxes give-aways to businesses. Less than a third of the biggest corporations in Louisiana pay any taxes at all. We are underwriting Hollywood fat cats to make movies here that brings in only a third of what we are paying out. Louisiana has come up short in every year that Jindal had governed and will keep coming up short until the legislature grows some balls and raises enough taxes to cover the expenses that the people want. The voters approved the Stelly tax plan and it was working great. Then the republican legislators shelved the income to please the lobbyists that own them and plunged the state into chaos. They need to put it back but none of them will. What they will do instead is pass more laws foisting creationism on our science students and introduce unconstitutional bills to discriminate against gays. The only good thing from all of this is that Bobby Jindal's record in Louisiana is so wretched that his political future is crap. Hopefully the voters will finally understand that the only way out of this is to vote out the irresponsible, paid-for right-wing legislators responsible for this mess.
Jindal has come far with major political appointments in the past based on his rhetoric. But now he has a record to be judged on as an elected official . . . and that record sucks. It is horrible and denying it only makes him look like a liar and the national media has picked up on it.
That's the crazy part. In each of the last 5 years I have owed the state taxes. My wife and I together didn't clear 3 figures and now that she has been laid off, we don't come close and I still owe Louisiana? Taxes will go up on the middle class, or certain tax credits will be taken away from us, all so the rich and big business can skate tax free. It's sickening.
The sad thing is that when Reagan called for tax cuts they were needed and paved the way for years of growth. Equally sad is that the needed spending cuts weren't enacted. Also not enacted is the very real and serious need for tax reform. What it did is freeze Republican discourse in its tracks. Now any R who advocates a reasonable reform that includes some increases it is DOA because of pols like Grover Norquist. Both parties but Rs to a greater extent than Ds have a snapshot of their positions from then and refuse to change with the changing times. They are also (both parties & wings) in the thrall of their big money contributors that they won't do what is needed. Jindal is one extreme example on the right. On the left, the leaders bankrupting Detroit, Illinois Cali etc are likely to find the same end.
The way to cut taxes is to first cut the spending and then and only then, pass the savings on by cutting an equal amount of tax income. But they don't do it that way. They just cut the income and somehow think that this will force government to make spending cuts. But government still has to do the mission it is assigned and they just keep borrowing money. It is insane.
