Jindaled

The Presidential election calendar is not friendly to the particular scam Bobby Jindal has been trying to run.  He's had Louisiana more or less on a crash course with budget hell for years now. The idea was to be well into his pursuit of national office before things started to fall apart at home.

And it was going okay too. Were it not for the fact that the national press begins vetting potential Presidential candidates so early in the process, it's unlikely that you'd see the local papers start to call him out this explicitly before he was long gone.

Year after year, Louisiana didn't have enough money to cover its expenses, yet Gov. Bobby Jindal refused to roll back income tax cuts or ever-increasing corporate tax breaks. Instead, he raided reserve funds and sold off state property.

Jindal suggested job growth from his economic development wins would replenish those assets once the recession ended. It hasn't — and money from the lucrative oil industry has taken a nose dive with crude prices. Now, the Republican is running out of short-term patches and is struggling to plug a $1.6 billion budget hole just as he tries to build support for a possible 2016 presidential run.

Funding for higher education and health care services will almost certainly be subject to cuts deeper than what they already have endured in recent years, and Jindal's successor will have to repay a string of debts and IOUs.

"They've used all the smoke that was in the can and all the mirrors that they could buy and now they're out of tricks. Their solution is to gut higher education like a fish," said Republican state Treasurer John Kennedy.

Note that the above is an AP report anyway.