If Louisiana’s Hungry Children Were Oil and Gas Companies, Jeff Landry Would Feed Them
Diamond, Louisiana. Photo by Amy Kennedy
This past week, Louisiana’s new Governor Jeff Landry made the unilateral decision that the state would not participate in the EBT program that feeds 600,000 food-insecure children over summer break. Landry is opting out of the federally-funded program that would help feed Louisiana children in order to save the $7 million dollars his office claims it costs the state to run the program.
Louisiana is 1 of 14 states refusing these federal dollars. All 14 states are led by Republican governors who cited outdated technology to administer the funds, or claimed that the programs are unnecessary since other–much smaller–programs already existed. Others, like Mississippi’s Governor Tate Reeves, were at least honest when explaining their decision to turn down the money; Reeves explained he wanted to shut down any “attempts to expand the welfare state.”
Governor Landry’s own hardline conservative political history reveals him to be just as philosophically opposed to social welfare programs, yet it wasn’t directly mentioned in his office’s statement last week about the decision: “Summer EBT is a pandemic era related program that costs $7 million dollars. The pandemic is over. Louisiana already administers robust social safety net programs [it doesn’t]…Under these numerous programs, every child will be able to receive the meals they need throughout the summer [they won’t].” (Pardon my uncontrollable interjections there.)
The program might cost $7 million dollars of administrative state money, but it would bring $71 million federal dollars directly to the people of Louisiana. Since EBT benefits purchase food items, those $71 million dollars would have gone to SNAP-authorized Louisiana businesses and grocery stores. By his own conservative, trickle-down standards, Landry’s math isn’t mathing.
Even if there are other, parish-wide programs feeding some of Louisiana’s food-insecure children, Landry’s decision is illogical. Louisiana is one of the poorest states in the country. Over 18% of Louisiana’s population lives in poverty–compared with 12.4% nationally. Even with other programs working in different parishes around the state to feed children over the summer months, Louisiana could obviously use all the help it can get.
Since Landry’s decision is illogical, short-sighted—not to mention cruel—it is most-likely political posturing and a loud statement of his anti-welfare stance. But just like Louisiana’s “robust social safety net,” Landry’s bootstraps philosophy on welfare programs has enormous holes in it and one pesky exception—and he’s not even quiet about it. In fact, Landry’s been talking up the same enormous welfare program since launching his gubernatorial campaign in 2022, and that program is called the Louisiana Industrial Tax Exemption Program or ITEP.
ITEP began in 1936 with the state-level Commerce and Industry Board granting 10-year property tax exemptions to new or expanding industries across the state. Since its inception, ITEP has remained the ONLY state-level board in the US with the power to make unilateral decisions about individual cities and parishes/counties’ tax subsidies, and before the 2016 reforms, the Commerce and Industry Board approved 99% of the applications that came across its desk. According to LA’s Office of Economic Development, local governments lost $10 billion (with a B) to ITEP between 2008-2015.
In 2016, then-governor John Bel Edwards reformed the ITEP process, cutting the property tax break from 100% to 80% and requiring businesses to include job creation provisions in their plans and applications. (These reforms also granted local governments power to approve ITEP applications that would affect their localities, but that specific reform was severely watered down by an Edwards’-supported resolution in 2020.)
In the same month that Governor Landry claimed the state couldn’t afford $7 million dollars to run the summer EBT welfare program, he also announced his plan to streamline the ITEP corporate welfare application process so that it’s easier and more profitable for industry. Landry plans to walk back the revision that requires companies to outline the jobs their presence will create in Louisiana. In other words, Landry wants to grant companies the ability to move into communities without paying their fair share of taxes, and without the promise of long-term job creation. His reasoning reveals his short-sighted vision: “If you’re building something, you’re creating jobs, and you’re creating opportunity.”
But what happens once those industrial complexes are built? What’s keeping companies from automating their production to cut labor costs? If a new complex ultimately creates 40 jobs but costs the state 80 million dollars in property taxes each year, what kind of benefits will Louisiana see?
Without the jobs revision, companies would be allowed to short-change Louisiana billions of tax dollars while polluting the air, water, and soil, and they could do it all without being required to make any long term reinvestment into Louisiana’s communities and people, which is something they are really really good at.
Also, while claiming that the EBT summer program is too unnecessary and expensive for Louisiana, Landry signaled that he will seek to lower the oil and gas severance tax rate. Currently, Louisiana’s oil and gas severance tax rate—the taxes levied when a natural resource is severed from the land/water bottoms within the boundaries of the state—is 12.5%. In 2021, the Louisiana House Ways and Means committee reported that the state earned $302 million dollars in mineral severance taxes that year alone. While Landry didn’t cite a specific amount when floating this cut, any reduction to this specific tax revenue will have significant effects on Louisiana’s public entities, which are already ranked as some of the worst in the country.
None of these moves are surprising when you consider that Landry spent the last 8 years as attorney general telling oil and gas executives that he would do exactly these things if he were elected governor. But Landry’s refusal to support a $7 million dollar welfare program that would help feed 600,000 Louisiana children is harder to stomach when he is so willing to give untold billions away to petrochemical companies.
In a (disappointing and breauxy) interview last month, WDSU’s Travers Mackel asked Landry how he planned to make Louisiana a more appealing place for kids and young families and to address the “brain drain” the state is currently experiencing. Landry immediately pivoted the conversation to industry in his response: “We want to focus on the businesses and industries that grew this state, the people who have stuck through the storms, the devastation, the natural disasters, the high taxes, the bad roads, and still were able to carve out a living. When you improve your overall business environment, everything else becomes organic.”
This response reveals so much about Landry’s politics and what Louisiana can expect from his tenure. He talks about the industries and the people of Louisiana as if they are one in the same, as if they’ve weathered the storms of life in Louisiana as equals. And yes, heavy industry has made it possible for hundreds of thousands of Louisianians to make a living. But Landry’s assumption here ignores the fact that these industries have also decimated wetlands, which increases the devastation of storms and disasters and makes property uninsurable; undercut tax revenue on the state level while simultaneously sinking property tax values for countless communities through pollution; destroyed the roads with industrial traffic; and ended self-sufficient water-adjacent lifestyles for communities that carved out a good living for hundreds–even thousands of years before heavy industry moved in. These industries haven’t just weathered the storms alongside the people of Louisiana; these industries have made those storms worse. And at times, these industries are the storms.
Landry’s “industry first” response also touches on his absolute faith in trickle-down economics. He assumes that industries will take care of the people of Louisiana, yet he spends his political career ensuring that they don’t have to. He condemns welfare policies that build a safety net under the people of Louisiana while simultaneously strengthening the net that keeps industrial profits from reaching the people of Louisiana. When you look at the state’s natural resources, and you consider how enthusiastically companies have exploited them for decades, and then you look at Louisiana’s unwavering spot as either 49 or 50 on every national metric, it should be apparent that trickle-down economics do not work in Louisiana.
Industries are not the people of Louisiana. And unless they are forced to, industries will not take care of the people of Louisiana. And for at least the next 4 years, it’s governor won’t either.
