The biggest battles I have fought in politics have been over money. There was the three-year-long fight in the 1980s to restore the Public Service Commission’s authority over the rates charged by Louisiana’s rural electric cooperatives. Temporarily set free from the PSC, cooperatives had quickly raised their rates by as much as 100 percent, setting off protests from rural residents on co-op power.

There was the fight to regulate payday loan companies. Among the abuses of this industry preying on poor people, I found a firm outside Fort Polk charging army soldiers 700 percent interest on loans. Despite a Legislature indifferent to consumer issues I managed to decriminalize payday loan defaults. There is still much to do to control this industry.

The “Big Daddy” of political money fights is my decades-long campaign to modernize how Louisiana taxes oil and gas. My “oil and gas processing tax” would replace the 1921 severance tax on Louisiana-produced oil and gas with a lower but broader processing tax on all oil and gas flowing through the state. It would tax all oil and gas processed in Louisiana the same, whether it is produced in Louisiana, in another state, in the deep offshore wells of the Gulf of Mexico or in a foreign country.  

The processing tax would raise $3 billion a year. We could abolish our state income tax and properly fund education, roads, healthcare and other services.

As you might imagine, the oil industry hates the processing tax like the devil hates holy water.  And in Louisiana, what the oil industry wants it usually gets, in this case preservation of the outmoded severance tax.

Political money fights bring out the big guns – the legislative and executive leaders, the top lobbyists and the most special of the special interests. Everyone has an opinion on how public dollars should be raised, spent or saved.

One of my favorite money fights has a happy ending and a snappy title: BEEF. It stands for Bossier Educational Excellence Fund. The name came from Gov. Edwin Edwards, who in 1985 supported my request to put $500,000 in Louisiana Downs racetrack tax revenue into a fund for Bossier Parish schools.  

Edwards knew I was in the cattle business. He also was familiar with the then-popular “Where’s the Beef?” slogan of the Wendy’s chain.

Few people know it, but my original intent with the $500,000 was to invest in a Shreveport-Bossier City zoo. Unfortunately, my local zoo supporters abandoned the project when then-Shreveport Mayor John Hussey came out against it.  

My friend Glenn Yago, knowing I had started out as a school teacher, suggested I put the money into a trust fund for education, and the Legislature went along.

BEEF is invested by the Bossier Parish School Board in securities backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government. The principal is protected and only the interest is spent on classroom needs in Bossier public schools.  

Started solely with racetrack revenues, it now receives money each year from the gambling casinos in Bossier Parish.

Over my objections then-Gov. Buddy Roemer raided BEEF during a budget crisis in the late 1980s. It took me two years but I restored the fund. Today BEEF has a principal of $38 million yielding interest each year for early childhood education, computer learning and other classroom needs.

Forward to the 1990s and another big money fight. Then-State Attorney General Richard Ieyoub sued the tobacco companies and won a $4 billion settlement for the state. I persuaded the Legislature to dedicate $1 billion of the settlement to establish a statewide version of BEEF.

The “Louisiana Educational Excellence Fund” was approved by voters in 1999 by a big 70-percent margin. LEEF is educationally sound and fiscally prudent, yielding interest payments each year for each school district in the state.

Forward to 2011, Gov. Bobby Jindal and another budget crisis. Despite lecturing the president about overspending, Jindal stuffed billions of dollars in federal funds into two successive state budgets. Yet he was still $1.6 billion short for the fiscal year beginning July 1 of that year.

Cornered by circumstances and his own rhetoric, Jindal raided the Millennium Trust Fund that incorporates EEF. He diverted $43 million annually that otherwise would go into the fund and dedicated it to TOPS, the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students. At the time TOPS shared in the tobacco settlement, but most of its fiscal support came from the General Fund.

As the author of the EEF, I objected. I wrote all 144 legislators that Jindal’s proposal to raid the Millennium Trust Fund was bad fiscal policy, educationally unsound and hypocritical.

Why hypocritical? When Louisiana sued the tobacco companies in the 1990s, Jindal was Gov. Mike Foster’s secretary of health and human services. Like Foster, Secretary Jindal opposed the tobacco lawsuit. 

Here was our state’s top health official standing with big tobacco instead of trying to reimburse state hospitals for treating people with smoking-related illnesses.

EEF serves all children in grades K-12 in Louisiana, even those in parochial and other schools. It was the product of a political money fight, it was one worth fighting.