Newsroom

BATON ROUGE – Public school teachers and support workers in Louisiana are long overdue for a pay raise. A decade of financial stagnation means the average teacher would need to earn an extra $4,004 to have the same buying power as their salary did in 2008.… Read more...

BATON ROUGE – The public safety net affects Louisiana residents in every city, town and legislative district. It helps families put food on the table in hard times, access medical care when they need it and provides tuition assistance that makes college more affordable.… Read more...

BATON ROUGE – Louisiana’s Medicaid program is the largest item in the state budget, and consumes more state general-fund dollars than anything except education. It also is a lifeline for nearly 1.8 million Louisiana citizens who are either low-income or have a disability.… Read more...

Louisiana has made great strides in providing health coverage for children in recent years. But the state still lags behind the rest of the country on some key quality measures, which could be improved with strategic policy changes.

BATON ROUGE – A group of health care, nonprofit and community leaders is urging Attorney General Jeff Landry to withdraw Louisiana from a lawsuit that seeks repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its protections for people with pre-existing conditions.… Read more...

Louisiana public schools have lost out on billions of dollars over the past decade since state policymakers stopped providing annual cost-of-living increases to local school districts. That has made it harder for districts to keep up with rising costs, and widened the funding gap between rich school districts and poor ones.

BATON ROUGE – A new study released Wednesday by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the Louisiana Budget Project finds that Louisiana has the 14th most unfair state and local tax system in the country, with the lowest-income Louisianans paying almost two times more in taxes as a percent of their income compared to the state’s wealthiest residents.… Read more...

BATON ROUGE – Black and Hispanic families in Louisiana have been disproportionately affected by a decade of cuts in state support for higher education, and the substantial tuition increases that have occurred as a result.

Average tuition and fees at a public four-year university accounted for 32 percent of median household income for Black families in Louisiana and 23 percent for Hispanic families in 2017, according to a new report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.… Read more...