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Follow TURFTexas budget hole comparable to California's
Dewhurst actually admits that a lot of what's in the state's budget doesn't square with the priorities of most Texans. Then says a line that plays well politically, but doesn't remotely resemble the truth since Dewhurst is for handing our Texas highways over to the highest bidder on Wall Street who will charge Texans 75 cents a mile to get to work? Here's what he said: "People could stake me and Gov. Perry on the ground and torture us, and we still would not raise taxes.” How is 75 cents a mile in new taxes on driving NOT a tax increase, Lt. Gov Dewhurst?
News of Texas budget hole continues to spread
By Jason Embry, February 7, 2011 -- Austin American Statesman
While those of us in the Texas press have been writing about the coming budget problems for years, especially during last year’s gubernatorial campaign, the rest of the country is starting to take notice. And some who have been the target of our state’s jabs appear to be getting some satisfaction out of it.
From this morning’s Los Angeles Times: “The lecturing from Texas leaders about how California wouldn’t be in such a budget mess if its politicians did business the way it is done in Austin has been relentless for years. … But the latest budget projections out of Texas have sharply changed the discussion: The Lone Star State is facing a budget gap of about $27 billion, putting it in the same league as California among states facing financial meltdowns. The gap amounts to roughly one-third of the state’s budget. … The scene in the statehouse in Austin in recent days would be familiar to those who frequent California’s Capitol. Throngs of advocates for the poor, the disabled and the elderly told ashen-faced lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee about the various horrors that would befall their clients if the state made its planned cuts. Nursing homes, rural health clinics and counseling centers for at-risk youth would close, they warned. One advocate said that under the Legislature’s plan, her grandchildren in Louisiana would have a more secure safety net than Texas children. The unfavorable comparison to a state many Texans regard with disdain was delivered like a gut punch. As if to punctuate the point that Texas has found itself in a California-style mess, a power-grid problem caused rolling blackouts statewide Wednesday as the Capitol was consumed with fiscal crisis. … The Texas budget crisis is prompting some experts to reconsider what had been dubbed the Texas Miracle. The state has much lower unemployment than California, but economists note that many of the jobs are low-paying. One out of three wage earners in Texas earns too little to keep a family of four above the federal poverty level, according to a 2009 study by the Corp. for Enterprise Development, a Washington-based nonprofit. That is double the percentage of similarly low-wage Californians. Such figures call into question whether Texas’ economy has really transitioned into a new 21st century model, or whether it has been buoyed by high oil prices and lots of loosely zoned land where construction of cheap houses endured through the recession. … Texas lags far behind California in major research universities, patents produced, high-tech infrastructure and venture capital investment, according to the Missouri-based Kauffman Foundation. The foundation’s 2010 ranking of states in ‘movement toward a global, innovation-based new economy’ put California at No. 7. Texas was No. 18.”
I thought the Texas miracle was in education during the 1990s?
Also from that story is this from Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst: “A lot of the things we are doing arguably aren’t priorities for the people of Texas. People could stake me and Gov. Perry on the ground and torture us, and we still would not raise taxes.”
Should Dewhurst be saying that a lot of what the state’s doing are not the people’s priorities when he has been the lieutenant governor during the writing of the last four budgets?