Our Views: Our oil drunk, our hangover

• Published: Dec 28, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Maybe it should be called Jindal’s Folly, because he signed it into law just six months ago. Or Shaw’s Folly, after the Shreveport state senator who proposed the cut in state income taxes.

Just months down the road, the riches of the state budget are turned into deficits. Yet every member of both chambers of the Legislature voted this year for final passage of the roughly $300 million income tax cut proposed by Sen. Buddy Shaw, R-Shreveport.

Nor was it the only tax cut or special dedication that cut into the general fund revenue this year at least a bit and next year a great deal more.

The biggest problem for lawmakers and Gov. Bobby Jindal was spending the state’s surplus fast enough.

“Anybody paying attention knew we were laying the groundwork for fiscal problems, as we cut taxes and raised spending,” said Jim Brandt, president of the Public Affiairs Research Council. “We hate to say, ‘We told you so.’ But unfortunately, we seem to be going right down that boom-and-bust cycle again.”

Brandt made that statement in The New York Times, where the hard times coming to Louisiana made for much different reading than the flattering profiles of early this year, when Louisiana’s progressive new governor was talking about change.

“In Louisiana the oil-drunk always ends badly,” said the Times, and the coming year appears to be one of hard times and harder choices for state government.

What should be distressing to Jindal and his admirers is how little that article could be changed to reflect what always happens, the boom-and-bust cycle of a misruled state.

The Shaw tax-cut bill and a creeping rise in the percentage of oil revenue in the state operating budget were problems waiting to explode. Maybe no one could predict the end of Wall Street as we knew it, but anyone could predict that volatile oil prices would not stay at record highs and the post-Katrina boom in state revenue wasn’t going to go on forever.

The most that Jindal would say was the post-hurricane revenue would likely plateau but would remain, if the experience of other states held here, at a somewhat higher level than it had been.