Governor Bobby Jindal’s rejection of $98 million in stimulus funding allocated to expand unemployment benefits in Louisiana will, apparently, stand, as a Louisiana House committee voted 6-3 today against a resolution to override Jindal’s wishes.
The House Labor Committee voted 6-3 against House Concurrent Resolution 8 by Democratic Rep. Rickey Hardy that would have been the first step in sidestepping the Republican governor’s decision. Committee Chairman Avon Honey, a Democrat, sided with opponents of the measure.
Hardy, D-Lafayette, said unemployed workers need the expanded benefits to help them take care of their families and cope with the national recession.
“Surely we can agree that we would like to see our citizens benefit from the money being offered by the federal government… It’s their money and they want it now,” he said.
The stimulus money would give unemployment benefits to thousands of people who normally wouldn’t be eligible for them, like certain part-time workers and people who leave jobs because of domestic abuse or a family member’s disability, and it would expand benefits to some others, including those with dependents.
Jindal opposed Louisiana getting the money because “it does come with strings attached,” according to his spokesman, namely that the increase in benefit allowance could increase businesses’ unemployment tax levels down the road.
Louisiana’s unemployment rate was 5.8 percent in March. That’s not one of the highest rates in the country — it’s in fact half of what unemployment is in Oregon — but what that number hides is that government spending is a big part of the reason (h/t publius) that Louisiana’s unemployment rate has been steady to begin with:
NEW ORLEANS — Years before Washington spent $787 billion on a national stimulus bill, it staged an unintended trial run in Louisiana, a huge injection of some $51 billion for which historians find few, if any, precedents in a single state.
The experiment is still playing out, but some indicators suggest that what occurred in Louisiana — dumping a large amount of reconstruction money into a confined space in the three and a half years since Hurricane Katrina — has had a positive outcome. The state’s unemployment rate of 5.7 percent in February was considerably below the national average of 8.1 percent, and it was the only state to see a drop in unemployment from December to January. It was also the only state with an increase in non-farm employment in February.
So Jindal and state lawmakers can rest easily, almost happily, on that cushion of federal aid that’s keeping their unemployment low when they refuse to expand benefits. In so doing, Jindal can throw down an impressive political gauntlet for whomever chooses to challenge him in 2012. Look forward to a lot of, “Louisiana kept its unemployment low without taking needless monies from the government” ads. (And then, let’s hope, look forward to rebuttals about the $1 billion he’s planning to add to the state’s budget this year thanks to that same stimulus).
SATURN SMITH 