Left refuses to see its causing LA depopulation

Blog: Between The Lines

Abstract

A recent musing about Louisiana population loss
contains a lot bathos, signifying the difficulty, if not unwillingness, that
the state's leftist institutions have in accepting what's plain to everybody
else.

Last week, the Baton Rouge Advocate ran a piece
about the latest 2023 census numbers, which show most Louisiana parishes lost population.
The state as a whole lost over 14,000 people in 2023, bring the total loss from
compared to 2015 to nearly 120,000 even as the country as a whole, and most
states, grew in numbers. In fact, the state's 0.31 percent loss trailed in percentage
terms only New York, and of the seven states that did lose population, four
were among the largest blue states, with purple Pennsylvania barely slipping
and only West Virigina among red states joining Louisiana.

Only Ascension, Beauregard, Bossier, Calcasieu, De
Soto, East Feliciana, Iberville, Lafayette, Livingston, St. Bernard, St.
Tammany, Tangipahoa, Vermillion, and West Baton Rouge gained – a few barely –
and none over one percent. Metropolitan statistical areas were a mixed bag:
energy-intensive areas Lafayette and Lake Charles and northshore Hamond and Slidell-Covington-Mandeville,
plus Baton Rouge eked out gains but Shreveport-Bossier City, Monroe,
Alexandria, Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, and New Orleans-Metairie shrunk. In
fact, New Orleans led the country in MSA slumping at 1.15 percent, while Houma was
fifth worst at 0.85 percent, Alexandria 16th worst at 0.60 percent,
Shreveport 36th worst at 0.43 percent, and Monroe 46th worst
at 0.34 percent. Hammond's 0.92 percent growth was best in the state and 92nd
best nationwide.

Louisiana's rural areas fared even worse than its
urban, while overall suburban areas held their own. That 50 parishes lost
population flummoxed the Advocate, which went on an extensive expedition
in search of explanations why since the 2020 census this had happened.

Natural disasters clearly had a role, but this
masked some notable divergences. For example, Lake Charles was coming back from
its travails, but Houma wasn't. And obviously a lot of places hadn't had
adverse weather events strike them in the past three years.

So, setting aside idiosyncratic elements, it had
to be policy, and to her credit Alison Plyer, the longtime chief demographer of
New Orleans' Data Center, hit upon that when queried by the reporter. But, as students
will tend to do in answering essay questions, they may guess correctly right
answer but provide the wrong reasons to explain it.

Plyer fell victim to this in two ways, although
one was only a partial bogey. She observed the poorer health statistics
reflected by Louisianans compared to almost every other state, which would lead
to earlier deaths offsetting births. Set aside, of course, that this is a temporary
effect; changes in cohort life spans would influence extremely marginally
overall population so long as the birth cohorts remained constant, so an
ongoing fall caused by shorter lifespans would make sense only in the context of
a sudden drop in life expectancy that isn't occurring (even if a relatively
rapid one such as during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic happens, it also
happened elsewhere, so relative change among states would be extremely marginal).

Yet that shouldn't be happening in Louisiana, using
the left's assumptions, because Medicaid
expansion! Now almost eight years old, that was supposed to provide all
sorts of additional health care people were missing to improve their lives. In
reality, a large minority of its new clients years ago simply dropped their private
insurance (or their employers did it when expansion rolled out) to get a new
freebie, so it's not like they didn't have health care insurance already. If,
of course, they could access Medicaid, with its limited providers and a lowest common
denominator approach that degraded the quality of care. And while you can throw
health care at people, you can't make them live healthy lives that would decrease
their health care usage. So, for the extra $450 million or so a year Louisiana
taxpayers pony up to subsidize other people's health care, there's very little
bang for the buck or explanatory power for population loss (if anything,
hanging out a new benefit not available in nearly all of the fastest-growing
states should attract residents).

But Plyer also made a very ignorant statement. Not
her observation that higher educational attainment helps to drive population
growth, but that state taxpayer subsidization falling a third since 2008 on a
per higher education student basis indicates that Louisiana spent less money on
tertiary education. In fact, in fiscal year 2008 $2.766
billion for 201,557 students
was budgeted for higher education or $13,723 per student, while in FY 2024
that will be $3.453 billion for 217,618 students or $15,867 per student, an
increase of 15.6 percent. The hoary and tired contention that Louisiana has "disinvested"
in higher education is an exhausted myth.

Yes, policy is the explanation, but not derived
from the blind alleys in the article. It's very simple: the cause is Democrat Gov.
John Bel Edwards' big spending, tax raising, benefit boosting (such as Medicaid
expansion), social justice pandering regime, insufficiently resisted by a Republican
Legislature short on leadership that only deigned to rein in Edwards' worst
attempted excesses. It discouraged producers from producing, if not their staying
in the state, and encouraged wasteful spending, criminal coddling, and more
people jumping on the wagon. It not
only led to depopulation, but fewer jobs than when he took office, anemic
personal income growth that barely outpaced inflation, crime rates heading
higher at an above average pace, and a coarsening culture that pandered to ideological
special interests.

And, of course, it was the three central cities
with Democrat mayors and solid Democrat majorities on their city councils – New
Orleans, Shreveport (although it now has a GOP mayor), and Alexandria – which were
among the worst performing local jurisdictions. However, notice how Lafayette and Lake Charles, run
by Republicans, bucked the trend.

Those shortcomings are the wages of liberalism and
are the kinds of things that drive people away – but leftist institutions aren't
going to admit that and will try to find any lame excuse to deflect from that. What's
obvious to everybody else they refuse to see, which makes the musings in that
article largely irrelevant, if not entirely counterproductive to reversing the state's
depopulation trend.