EDITORIAL: State Must Rethink Proposed Cuts
The Daily Advertiser (excerpt)

The sight at the state Capitol last week was the final stop in the state's journey back to financial reality. And what a long, strange trip it's been.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, we had become accustomed to the annual migration of state residents to a Capitol committee room to fight for their little pieces of the state budget pie. In the flush, post-Katrina days, when there was plenty to go around, the annual pilgrimage all but disappeared. But that was then. And, this is now, and, oh, what a difference a few years can make.

Last week, they were back. They returned in wheelchairs, in brightly colored matching shirts loudly proclaiming their needs. They came from disparate communities across Louisiana. They were urban and rural, and they were afraid - afraid of losing state money that provides them some service or some livelihood they've come to depend on. And, they are a distraction.

That is not to say that their needs aren't very real or even that they don't have valid cases to make to preserve state funding for their program or project. It is to say that this year's $1.3 billion or so deficit is, frankly, the least of our worries.

In management circles, there is an old maxim that, if you let it, the urgent will always trump the important. And that is a mistake - one Louisiana has made for decades and compounded when we failed to take advantage of flush times to make significant changes to prepare us for this inevitable day when we would land right back where we started. It is a mistake we can ill afford to continue to make.