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Follow TURFOpen Letter to Rush & Hannity: Steer clear of Rick Perry
Dear Hannity, Limbaugh, and Beck,
There's something you've got to know. I'm a Texan, and Rick Perry is the BIGGEST toll-tax happy Governor in the nation. He's trying to turn every single lane of a highway near my house into a tollway and make us pay TWICE for what's already built and paid for. He's doing it all over Texas with over 500 toll projects being contemplated RIGHT NOW, while he tries to tell America he's cut taxes.
Even worse, he's trying to sell-off our public highway system to foreign companies in public private partnerships or PPPs (right out of the the Agenda 21 playbook). PPPs are sweetheart deals with massive taxpayer subsidies (that socialize the losses and privatize the profits) and charge us 75 cents PER MILE to access our PUBLIC roads.
On one road in DFW that translates to $13/day in new taxes or over $3,000 a year MORE per year just to get to work. Meanwhile, he signed a budget that INCREASED diversions of our state gas taxes to non-road uses (fuel taxes are supposed to be Constitutionally dedicated fund only for roads, so he's violated the Texas Constitution!). That same budget was 'balanced' using accounting gimmicks putting payments to Medicaid and schools into the next budget year to get them off this budget’s books and make it look ‘balanced,’ plus he’s amassed a whopping $31 billion in road debt in just 5 years -- meanwhile State spending has nearly doubled on Rick Perry's watch...yet he claims to be all about upholding the Constitution and purports himself to be a fiscal conservative.
And all this is aside from his biggest albatross....the Trans Texas Corridor. It was to be a 4,000 mile network of toll roads 1,200 feet wide (that's FOUR football fields wide - would have bisected whole communities and displaced 1 million people on just the first corridor) and the biggest land grab in TX history forcibly taking 580,000 acres of private Texans' land and handing it over to a foreign company in one of these PPPs for a HALF CENTURY. Texans rebelled and the legislature finally repealed it, but Perry still lists it as one of his many accomplishments.
If you don't like the unaccountable taxation of toll roads (in the hands of unelected bureaucrats no less), then you won't like Rick Perry. Steer clear. Then there's his corporate welfare slush funds, the HPV vaccine mandate (as a pay-off to campaign donor Merck and its lobbyist, a former Perry staffer Mike Toomey), his weakness on illegal immigration and securing our borders, the revolving door between his aides and those doing business with the state, steering public money and high level appointments to his campaign donors, and the list goes on and on. Perry's rhetoric doesn't match his record.
If you want more info, we Texans have formed a grassroots organization established to fight this stuff: www.TexasTURF.org.