The Texas myth

Louisiana should be like Texas. It's a battle cry screamed across Baton Rouge almost as much as "Geaux Tigers"—and with equal passion. You hear it every legislative session, on every campaign trail, at every business lobby pitch. Be like Texas, no income tax, little regulation and eye-popping growth.

Sounds great. Who doesn't want to be like Texas, right now the most economically dominant and vibrant state in America? One problem: It's structurally impossible, and Louisiana's own governing choices have made sure of that.

Why it matters: The problem with the Lone Star love isn't the aspirational rhetoric; it's that it distracts from the harsh truth that Louisiana's governing model and tax structure are about as far from Texas as a state can get.

Eliminating the income tax, more tax incentives or fewer regulations are not going to change that.

A familiar refrain: The Texas comparison has been a fixture of Louisiana politics and business lobbying for nearly two decades.

• Jeff Landry made it the explicit rationale for the 2024 special session tax overhaul, collapsing the income tax to a flat 3% and abolishing the corporate franchise tax.
• Richard Nelson, who ran against Landry in 2023 on a platform of eliminating the income tax, dropped out and backed Landry—then became the architect of that overhaul as his revenue secretary.
• Bobby Jindal made the most aggressive attempt while governor, pushing to eliminate the income tax in 2013. It collapsed when the sales tax increase required to replace lost revenue proved politically untenable—and the Stelly Plan repeal he signed earlier had already blown a structural hole in the state budget that his successor inherited.
• LABI, Louisiana's most powerful business lobby, invokes Texas in nearly every legislative session—using it to defend industrial tax incentives, oppose regulation and argue for lower corporate tax burdens.

The eyes of...: Texas decentralized fiscal power to cities and counties and accepted the consequences.

• There's no income tax because local governments fund themselves—aggressively—through property taxes, among the highest in the nation.
• Cities and counties there have broad home rule authority. They can act without asking the state's permission.
• Texas counties are largely self-sufficient. State transfers are the exception, not the lifeline.

Louisiana's reality: Louisiana centralized everything and accepted those consequences.

• Local governments are constitutionally prohibited from taxing income, severance or motor fuels—leaving them almost entirely dependent on sales and property taxes, both constrained by exemptions.
• The homestead exemption—shielding the first $75,000 of a home's market value from parish property taxes since 1980—deliberately suppresses the revenue source that funds Texas-style local government. The Legislature's instinct has been to expand it, not reduce it.
• Roughly a third of Louisiana's 64 parishes would be bankrupt without state transfers. That's not a Texas problem because Texas never built that dependency in the first place.

Dream vs. reality: The appeal of the Texas model is real and the legislative push to get there is genuine.

• "Texas being at zero and Florida being at zero and our neighbors in Mississippi are getting on a pathway to zero income tax, I want Louisiana to keep up in order for our economy to continue to grow," said Rep. Julie Emerson, R-Carencro, who authored the tax overhaul package and is now the governor's chief of staff.
• "Everybody wants to be like Florida and Texas, but if you look at their property taxes, to do that in Louisiana, we'd have to have a 100-mill property tax to replace that money," countered Rep. Robby Carter.

Hybrid won't work: Cutting income taxes while preserving the homestead exemption, protecting industrial incentives meant to overcome Louisiana's byzantine tax code and leaving local governments constitutionally dependent on state transfers doesn't produce a Texas-style economy. It produces Louisiana with lower revenue.

Jindal proved it can't work without offsetting budget cuts. Landry's 2024 overhaul is still working out the consequences.

The bottom line: Texas and Louisiana made different choices decades ago and built different systems around those choices. Louisiana's problem isn't that it hasn't tried hard enough to be Texas. It's that it never built the foundation Texas did—and shows no sign of starting.