When employers leave towns like Pineville, Louisiana, they often do it with a deaf ear to the pleading of state and local governments, The New York Times Magazine details in an upcoming feature.
But in the case of Huey P. Long, the employer was the government itself. Its demise began, arguably, in 2008, when Bobby Jindal was swept into the Louisiana governor’s mansion on a small-government-and-ethics platform, promising to modernize the state and unleash the power of American private industry along the Gulf Coast.
At the time, Louisiana was flush with federal funds for Hurricane Katrina reconstruction and running a budget surplus, the magazine notes. Jindal and the state Legislature slashed income taxes and started privatizing and cutting. “This was a source of great pride for Jindal,” the magazine writes. “During his failed bid for the presidency last year, he boasted that bureaucrats are now an endangered species in Louisiana. ‘I’ve laid off more of them than Trump has fired people,’ he said, ‘and I’ve cut my state’s budget by more than he’s worth.’”
He laid off more than just bureaucrats. Jindal cut appropriations for higher education, shifting the cost burden onto students themselves. (State spending per student was down more than 40% between 2008 and 2014; just one state, Arizona, cut more.) And he shuttered or privatized nine charity hospitals that served the state’s uninsured and indigent. They were outdated and costly, Jindal argued, and private management would improve access, care and the bottom line. Huey P. Long was one of those hospitals.
The state has added 80,000 new jobs since the Great Recession officially ended in 2009. But at the same time, jobs have been shrinking at every level of government, the magazine notes, with local offices losing 10,600 workers, the state government 31,900 and the federal government 1,600. “Louisiana is an exaggerated case, but the pattern persists when you look at the country as a whole,” the story says. “Since the recession hit, private employers have added five million jobs and the government has lost 323,000. The country has recovered from the recession. But public employment has not.”
The New York Times Magazine cites the public sector’s slow decimation as one of the unheralded reasons that the middle class has shrunk as the ranks of the poor and the rich have swollen in the post-recession years. “This is certainly true in Louisiana, where five of the 10 biggest employers are public institutions, or health centers that in no small part rely on public funds,” the magazine says. “In Rapides Parish, which includes Pineville, the biggest employer is the school district.”
“Across the country, when public-sector workers lose their jobs, the burden disproportionately falls on black workers, and particularly women—people like Theresa Jardoin and Linette Richard,” the magazine says. “We felt middle class,’ Richard told the magazine. “Now we feel kind of lower.”
