This week on "Wingin' It Wednesday", panelists Mike Stagg, Warren Caudle, and Carol Ross joined "Nathan and Bernie in the Morning" to discuss Governor Jindal's alliance with Americans for Tax Reform as well as a proposed tax for the oil and gas industry.

Here's what the panel had to say:

1.  Is Bobby Jindal too beholden to Americans for Tax Reform. Some say approach to budget is insane. Your thoughts?

Warren Caudle started us off:

When you mention these three words together: governor, Jindal, and budget; it’s something like a Saturday Night Live sketch. How much longer does Louisiana have to put up with this stuff. I think we have a little more of a spending problem than anything else.
Jindal needs to retire and go on Saturday Night Live.

Mike Stagg posited:

The state does not have a spending problem, the General Fund is smaller now than it was 30 years ago. Jindal took an oath of office that should trump his pledge. He was elected governor of Louisiana not once but twice and he’s failed miserably at that.
When he took office Kathleen Blanco had left over a billion dollar surplus. We’re going to be $2 billion dollars in the hole this year by the time we get to may. He’s a catastrophe as governor, yet he continues to preen that he’s going to be a national contender. If legislatures make cuts this year, the campaign against them will be easy. What did you do while Jindal was burning the state down.

Carol Ross started us off:

Our priorities are totally upside down. We have way too many four year universities in this state per population. We have so many dedicated funds because nobody trusts the legislature or the governor.
Governor Jindal is very adept at blaming everyone else.
We have a structural problem with the way the budget is done, and we have a spending problem. It’s completely ridiculous and nobody is looking at this logically.

Wingin It Wednesday; KPEL 96.5

2. Oil and gas processing tax to be proposed again. Here are some articles.  Your thoughts?

Mike started us off:

I’m against it for this basic reason: I think first order of business is to make the oil and gas industry pay the severance tax that they are not currently paying right now. We’ve had 21 years of exemption on horizontal drilling which meant we didn’t make any severance tax money on the Haynesville Trend when it was the most profitable shale gas field in the country. Then there’s the fact that the state has already given the oil and gas industry a two year tax holiday. The severance tax is the constitutional claim of all of us on the mineral wealth of this state. It’s 12-percent and we should collect the severance tax before we go tilting windmills that will never tilt anyway. The money is there. Collect the taxes we are owed and stop exempting taxes we should be collecting.

Warren said:

There are several oil companies who have said that they are totally in favor of doing away with several of those tax exemptions, the problem is they don’t want to sit down and create a comprehensive plan that will solve our problems. I’ve said over and over that the oil processing tax makes the most sense as long as you offset it by doing away with the state income tax. If you do away with a state income tax both corporate and personally, you’ll have companies that can at 15-percent to their bottom line by moving back to Louisiana. It just makes sense. You’ve got your refineries, your pipelines, all that stuff.
I’m also not totally opposed to readdressing the exemptions that we do.

Carol concluded:

It’s very simple. DOA. It’s not going anywhere. Part of the problem is that there are so many concessions in there. The oil and gas industry pays a lot of money to this state. This is a bad idea going nowhere.
Give it up and let’s focus on the real problem. There’s no fiscal sanity. People do not want to give any government at any level any money because they’ve proven that they are not good stewards of our mone

To listen to the full audio from our Wingin' It panelists, click the play button below:

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think about today’s Wingin’ It Wednesday topics. Who got it right, who got it wrong, and who was way off?

Let us know in the comment section.

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