The re-whiting of LSU
LSU begins eliminating diversity programs; and if you're concerned about the deficit and the national debt, your choice for president is clear
It should come as no surprise that the Jeff Landry-controlled LSU Board of Supervisors would begin eliminating all diversity and inclusion programs at the state’s flagship university.
No one paying attention in the past year could be shocked that Landry and his appointees would start the process of re-whiting LSU as soon as possible.
And that’s what they did on Thursday.
Nonetheless, the fact that it was done and none of the Black members of the board had the courage or the decency to stand up and oppose the board resolution that launched this process was jarring and disgraceful.
According to the Louisiana Illuminator’s Piper Hutchinson, here’s how it went down: “The resolution, made public only moments before the board voted on it, passed without objection, though every Black board member except for Chairman Jimmie Woods — Collis Temple, James Williams and Valencia Jones — left the meeting before the resolution was voted on.”
And, after watching him operate for the past several years, it should not be surprising that President William Tate, the university’s first Black president, would serve as Landry’s handmaiden and help usher in this re-whiting. (If Tate said anything in opposition to this decision, the press in the room did not report it. It would have been big news had he done so.)
The assumption among many faculty and others during Bill Tate’s early time as president was that he was eager for a better job at a more prestigious university. Now, it seems clear that Tate is not as marketable as he (and we) might have first thought. It seems he’s stuck at LSU and, in fact, his other job prospects must be so poor that he believes he must do whatever it takes to keep his current job.
The reward for his subservience to Landry’s anti-diversity agenda? A 100 percent pay increase.
Honestly, viewing Tate through the lens of craven greed is, by far, the most generous way to view his role in this disgraceful decision. To not view it this way — he’s just selling out to keep his $1.5 million salary — would be to believe that Tate really believes that LSU should stop trying to create a more diverse faculty and student body.
You’d have to believe that Tate is unaware of LSU’s disgraceful first 100 years, during which it barred Black students from its undergraduate ranks. You’d also have to believe that Tate believes the sad legacy of those racist policies — 15 percent Black enrollment in a state that is one-third Black — is acceptable. And you’d have to believe that Tate believes LSU is now too-Black and has enough Latino students.
You’d have to believe Tate thinks LSU is not white enough.
Maybe Tate believes LSU is diverse enough and shouldn’t work any harder to attract a more diverse student body. That’s clearly how Landry and many other members of the LSU Board see things.
But, as low as my regard for Bill Tate is — and it’s very, very low — I refuse to believe he’s cast his lot with the racists because he’s now on their side.
I choose to believe Tate just sold out to them for more money.
The King of national debt
I know people who talk a lot about what they see as the unsustainable national debt. Some of them, strangely, seem more concerned about it when there’s a Democrat in the White House.
I rarely heard my conservative friends fret about deficit spending when Donald Trump was in office.
Regardless, I understand that our national debt concerns many people.
Suppose that’s your motivating issue in this election. In that case, you should pay attention to the news that Trump’s proposals would increase the national debt by more than twice as much as Vice President Kamala Harris’s proposals.
“Under our central estimate,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) said on Oct. 7, “Vice President Harris’s plan would increase the debt by $3.50 trillion through 2035, while President Trump’s plan would increase the debt by $7.50 trillion.”
The CRFB released its report before Trump on Thursday promised even more deficit spending on new tax cuts.
The main driver of Trump’s deficit? Renewing the tax cut for billionaires that he signed during his previous term. As the Washington Post explained:
Trump has called for extending his 2017 tax cuts, which would add more than $5 trillion over 10 years to the United States’ $35.7 trillion national debt, according to a study from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). His plan to end taxes on overtime wages, Social Security benefits and tips would add another $3.6 trillion in debt. And his call for a nationwide campaign to detain and deport undocumented immigrants would cost $350 billion.
Trump says major new tariffs on imports would bring in enough revenue to offset all the tax cuts, but the study doesn’t support that claim, and many economists say the tariffs would also drive prices up for U.S. consumers. . . .
Both candidates do have plans to raise some federal revenue: The tariffs Trump has proposed would reach as high as 20 percent on all $3 trillion of annual imports, which could bring in $2.7 trillion in revenue, according to CRFB.
But, by some of his own economic advisers’ analysis, the tariffs could also dramatically increase prices and depress U.S. economic output, because producers often pass on the cost of import duties to consumers. Lower economic output might also mean lower tax revenue.
The Post reported that the Harris campaign disputes the CRFB numbers on the new revenue she proposes to raise.
“Many of the things were assumptions, not things she’s proposed,” a Harris economic adviser told the paper. “And the cost of keeping the pledge [not to raise taxes on those making less than $400,000] is unknown, and in negotiations and could be significantly less.”
As the paper noted, “Harris has said she would pay for each of her policy proposals, and under one budget model CRFB studied, her plans would not raise the debt at all.”
There are many reasons to believe the CRFB when it says that Trump would substantially increase the national debt. Chief among them is that he already did it.
As ProPublica reported in 2021:
One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.
The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.
The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.
In June, the CRFB compared Trump’s debt with Biden’s, and it wasn’t a close call:
Maybe one reason so many Republican voters aren’t upset by Trump’s debt is that it’s not the kind they hate. In other words, it’s not deficit spending to help the “wrong people.”
Debt to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires = good, trickle-down economics
Debt to pay for social programs and tax cuts for the middle class = wasteful spending
All this is beside the point that we may be wrong to worry so much about the national debt.
That is the point economists like New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman have made. Here’s Krugman from a column in June:
Bear in mind that governments, unlike individuals, never have to pay off their debt. How did we pay off the debt from World War II? We didn’t. Federal debt when John F. Kennedy took office was slightly higher than it had been in 1946. But debt as a percentage of G.D.P. was way down, thanks to growth and inflation.
So what would it take to stabilize debt as a percentage of G.D.P. for the next 30 years? Bobby Kogan and Jessica Vela of the Center for American Progress, working with Congressional Budget Office numbers, estimate that we would need to increase taxes or cut spending by 2.1 percent of G.D.P.
That isn’t a big number! (Yes, the exact number could be either bigger or smaller, but in either case probably not by enough to change the basic point.) America collects a much smaller percentage of its G.D.P. in taxes than most other rich countries; collecting an extra two percentage points would still leave us a low-tax nation and would be unlikely to hurt the economy. If stabilizing debt seems hard, that’s only because given our deeply divided politics, even modest steps toward responsibility are extremely hard to take.
And by deeply divided politics I mostly mean Republicans, who declaim the evils of debt while pursuing policies that put long-run fiscal sustainability even farther out of reach. In a related analysis, Kogan and Vela estimate that permanently extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts — many of which are scheduled to expire after 2025 — would substantially worsen the fiscal outlook. Yet it’s hard to find Republicans in Congress opposing such an extension.
Worse yet, House Republicans are pushing for drastic cuts in the Internal Revenue Service budget, depriving the agency of the resources it needs to crack down on wealthy tax cheats. That is, even as they yell about budget deficits, they’re both seeking to cut taxes and trying to block efforts to collect the taxes high-income Americans owe under current law.
So politics — specifically right-wing politics — rather than the size of the debt is the problem.
1. Gov. Landry is slowly but surely accomplishing on the state level what Mr. Trump hopes to accomplish on the national level to enshrine the conservative agenda. I have to wonder if Mr. Trump admires or envies him. As to higher education in Louisiana, it has always placed power politics above everything else and apparently always will. If the polls are correct, most Louisianans support the policies of Mr. Trump and Gov. Landry.
2. Only V. P. Harris seems to dispute the projected increase in national debt (analysis of the deficit-reducing effect of her proposals) and she is also the only candidate who cares about it one way or another. The last time we had a balanced federal budget was during the Bill Clinton administration and nobody seemed to much care about it then either. As led by our elected officials, we continue to be among the most short-sighted of first world countries.
Tate’s reign at LSU has been one photo op after another, plus a 100% raise and a new Lakefront mansion.