Under Democrat Governor John Bel Edwards, Louisiana is falling behind - whether he wants to admit it or not. A new study puts the state of Louisiana firmly at the bottom when it comes to best and worst state economies in the U.S.
In order to determine which states are pulling the most weight, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 28 key indicators of economic performance and strength. Our data set ranges from GDP growth to startup activity to share of jobs in high-tech industries. Read on for our findings, expert insight from a panel of researchers and a full description of our methodology.
According to the study, Louisiana comes in at number 50 – the second-to-last state in the rankings.
But this isn’t the first time that Louisiana’s economy has ranked poorly under Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ tenure. In May, U.S. News & World Report ranked Louisiana dead last in its state rankings - for the third year in a row.
As The Times-Picayune noted at the time, the ranking “considers a range of factors, including the state of health care, education, the economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, crime and corrections, and the natural environment. Louisiana ranked at or near the bottom in all categories.”
If that weren’t bad enough, rankings released in February by Zippia showed that Louisiana is the worst state to find a job in the nation. And in 2018, Louisiana was ranked by CNBC as having the 44th worst business climate in the nation.
Louisiana's economy is in decline under Edwards, but one wonders: Is the governor even paying attention? Or is he willfully ignoring the facts? Despite the numbers, Gov. Edwards has repeatedly insisted that Louisiana's economy is doing well.
Last December he boasted that the economy “is improving.”
In January, he bizarrely told a group of reporters that the state is “doing better” under his watch.
A couple of weeks later, he again insisted that Louisiana is “better off” under his watch.
When will Gov. John Bel Edwards wake up and realize that his anti-business, tax-and-spend policies are hurting Louisianans? Edwards is trying to sell the fiction that Louisiana’s economy has improved under his leadership, but the numbers tell a different story.
