With LSU tuition, fees and housing all priced under $10,000 and increases to higher education spending, Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana is the bee’s knees of the South.
Too bad Bobby’s Louisiana is not my Louisiana. Or yours. Or anyone else’s for that matter.
Jindal is stuck in some delusional universe where the 95 percent increase to Louisiana higher education’s tuition and fees does not exist. Perhaps Jindal can’t see it past the fog of statistical misrepresentations he conjured with the voodoo magic of his loyal staff.
During his appearance on Morning Joe, Jindal stated the cost of going to LSU is “certainly well under $10,000, when you look at fees and housing.”
In 2015, $20,564 for tuition, fees, housing and books is $20,564. So unless Jindal was using the 1987, inflation reduced version of today’s dollar, it does not cost under $10,000 to attend LSU.
Jindal also tried to dupe us by blaming our $1.6 billion budget shortfall on the drop in the price of oil. The budget shortfall in 2013 (when I cried every time I filled up my car at the gas tank, watching the total cost climb higher and higher as miniscule amounts of gasoline trickled into my red Saturn) was $963 million. Low gas prices did not get the budget deficit to $963 million. In fact, they only make up 13 percent of our budget.
Our illustrious governor also thinks he increased state funding to higher education since he took office.
The Washington Post fact-checked Jindal’s ridiculous claim during a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor that Louisiana’s higher education budget “is actually a little bit, just slightly, higher” than when he took office, finding his claim to be false. With significant cuts to the state funding of colleges and universities, Jindal hid the cuts behind increases to the student financial assistance program and student tuition and fees.
According to the Louisiana House of Representatives’ Fiscal Division, state funding to higher education has decreased by somewhere between 32 and 48 percent since Jindal took office. However, there was no way the rest of America can know a presidential candidate would butcher education with a machete to pay for his own fiscal failures.
So with the help of statistics and the hope no one would notice, Jindal and his lackeys ignored certain figures here and there to create a higher education budget that increased instead of decreased. Unfortunately for Jindal, tape is not a good adhesive for machete cuts.
Covering up the hole in the wall with a picture frame to hide our accident from your mother only buys you so much time. It’s too bad Jindal used his not-so-representative portrait of himself to cover up his gaping fiscal holes in the wall. Leave it to good ole Bobby, though, to try to smooth things over with conflicting statements.
At the same breakfast our beloved governor made his higher education claim, he stated that America’s melting pot is one of the greatest aspects of our country. Unless of course you are a Muslim, in which case, Jindal would say “we need integration and assimilation for people who want to come live in our society.”
Jindal sounds like the Borg collective from Star Trek — you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Resistance may not be futile for higher education, however. The Governor releases next year’s budget proposal on Feb. 27. According to the University administration’s worst case scenario, the budget cuts would lay off 27 percent of LSU’s faculty, cut 1400 classes and jeopardize the accreditation of the engineering and business schools.
If students continue to raise their voices in anger over Jindal’s fiscal fiasco, the governor may finally decide to lift certain tax exemptions and tax credits the state provides to certain industries.
Over the past week, Jindal has received scathing reviews of his disastrous governorship from POLITICO, The Washington Post and The American Conservative. The national news media is not letting him off the hook, and neither should we.
In Bobby’s Louisiana, backward may be the current state of mind, but not in our Louisiana. Our Louisiana is a cultured and diverse state where moving forward in the name of future generations is a community mandate not to be trifled with.
Justin DiCharia is a 20-year-old mass communication junior from Slidell, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @JDiCharia.