I know, let's raise taxes and say we didn't

Without an agreement, the pain of what had been a potential $1.6 billion shortfall would have fallen almost entirely on higher education and health care. The state’s public colleges and universities, already having borne some of the deepest state funding cuts in the country, had contemplated mass layoffs, closing departments and financial exigency.

The most direct way to prevent these scenarios was to raise revenue. And, indeed, legislators spent the session haggling over cigarette taxes and tax exemptions.

Mr. Jindal was open to some of those ideas, but insisted he would veto anything that would violate his pledge against raising net tax revenue. So in consultation with Americans for Tax Reform, the Washington-based antitax advocacy group led by Grover Norquist, the Jindal administration presented a complicated arrangement that came to be known as the SAVE plan.

The plan obligated $350 million of the revenue raised during the session to higher education, thus preventing cuts. That was augmented by an “assessment” of around $1,600, called SAVE — “Student Assessment for a Valuable Education” — on the state’s public college students.

Nobody would actually pay this assessment because a student would also be granted a tax credit against that assessment. The student’s tax credit, in turn, would be transferred to the state Board of Regents, the body that runs higher education. The board would then use the credit to draw money from the Department of Revenue.

Under the plan, no one’s current tax burden would go up or down a cent.

But the Jindal administration said the arrangement would constitute an offset to the new tax revenue that was raised this term, and would thus keep his administration on the right side of its tax pledge.

Lawmakers have called the provision everything from “money laundering” to “stupid,” and that was just the Republicans. A Democratic state senator proposed an amendment to change the name of the credit from SAVE to DUMB, for “Don’t Understand Meaning of Bill.” (He later withdrew the amendment.)

“There is no way you can explain that it’s an offset,” said Robert Travis Scott, the president of the nonpartisan Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. He concluded, “This is a vehicle that allows Governor Jindal to raise taxes, period.”