Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

To offer an “incentive,” Jindal lowered corporate income taxes so that state revenue from such companies fell from $703 million in 2008 to $290 million in 2012. He lowered oil severance taxes so that the state received over $1 billion in 2008 but less than $886 million in 2012. It also lost another $2.4 billion between 2000 and 2014 because some oil companies were exempted from oil severance taxes altogether. (With approval from the state, new businesses are eligible to avoid paying local property taxes on new building and equipment costs.) Indeed, according to the Louisiana Economic Development and Tax Foundation, Louisiana offers “the lowest business taxes in the entire country for new manufacturing projects.” And for three years it was impossible to tell whether the oil companies paid anything at all to the state since the job of auditing oil company payments was handed over to the Office of Mineral Resources, which has close ties with the industry and which, between 2010 and 2013, performed no audits at all. So apart from providing 15 percent of jobs in Louisiana, oil was providing less and less financial benefit to the state. Oil was costing more to lure to the state and, once there, giving less to it. Meanwhile, to pay for this, public workers were fired and the state debt—$83 billion in 2012, much of it in unfunded public pension liabilities—remained.