(Official editorial of the Times-Picayune/Advocate, April 6, 2025)
The defeat of Amendment 2 on the statewide ballot last month should not mean the end for some individual proposals within the amendment. If legislators give voters a menu of options for reform rather than a massive, all-or-nothing package, real reform might actually happen.
And the shape of that reform could be largely, if not entirely, along the general lines envisioned in the failed Amendment 2.
Among the parts of the package that should be salvaged one way or another, consider three to start with.
We agree Louisiana should make permanent the $2,000 teacher pay raise that otherwise will expire at the end of the current school year. We agree the state should move away from the business inventory tax. And we agree that property taxes should not be assessed on medicines in storage.
The teacher pay raise can and should be accomplished statutorily, one way or another, in the coming legislative session. Although it was technically time-limited when first introduced, nobody ever really expected it to disappear. Attracting and keeping good teachers should always be a priority. Before the $2,000 addition, the average teacher pay in Louisiana of around $54,000 was substantially below the southern average of more than $59,000, according to the Southern Regional Education Board. To be competitive, Louisiana needs to keep the $2,000 and add more on top.
Meanwhile, Amendment 2’s proposal to incentivize local governments to eliminate the local business inventory tax is a good idea. Only nine states fully tax business inventory. Louisiana should join the other 41 states that wisely realize that a tax that applies even to unprofitable businesses, while requiring significant paperwork burdens atop the actual tax costs themselves, is both unfair and economically counterproductive.
Louisiana’s inventory tax system involves some complicated trade-offs, but one way or another, the tax ought to be phased out.
Finally, for parishes that still choose to charge inventory taxes, Amendment Two included a smart recommendation to prohibit those taxes from applying to prescription drugs. If medicine can be stockpiled cheaply to guard against future price hikes, government should not tax its storage.
Overall, the basic thematic thrust of Amendment 2 — namely, reducing exemptions and complications in the tax code and providing legislators at least a little more ability to adjust to changing circumstances — was a good one. It would help going forward, though, if there were more rhyme and reason as to when, where and why the Legislature merits more discretion on how to spend which revenues. Amendment 2 was confusing, in that it provided more discretion in some places while removing discretion entirely in others.
In recent days, a number of legislators have said they “got the message” that voters prefer reform in bite-sized chunks. If the lawmakers follow up accordingly, both the state government’s finances and the state’s economy can benefit.
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[That’s the whole editorial. In case you want the original link, it is here.]
