Via Zandar, there’s trouble in conservative paradise:
This month the state’s (Texas’s) part-time legislature goes back into session, and the state is starting at potentially a $25 billion deficit on a two-year budget of around $95 billion. That’s enormous. And there’s not much fat to cut. The whole budget is basically education and healthcare spending. Cutting everything else wouldn’t do the trick. And though raising this kind of money would be easy on an economy of $1.2 trillion, the new GOP mega-majority in Congress is firmly against raising any revenue.
So the bi-ennial legislature, which convenes this month, faces some hard cuts. Some in the Texas GDP have advocated dropping Medicaid altogether to save money.
So why haven’t we heard more about Texas, one of the most important economy’s in America? Well, it’s because it doesn’t fit the script. It’s a pro-business, lean-spending, no-union state. You can’t fit it into a nice storyline, so it’s ignored.
No-union, small-government border state….gee, I wonder who will be blamed for the budget crisis?
kindness
If Phaux News get’s their wish liberals and treasonous Democrats will take the fall.
Rush will tell us soon enough.
schrodinger's cat
Obama, of course.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Who will be blamed?
Obama
Brown People
Welfare Queens
Unions in Other States
I’m sure I’m missing a few right wing boogeymen.
Steeplejack
That’s a cold shot, DougJ.
DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
Immigrants!
Legalize
Mexicans.
The end.
General Stuck
Hire a nurse and put a teevee in every classroom, permanently tuned to Fox News Channel, and save a bundle.
Ross Hershberger
Maybe they plan to go through with that secession movement and apply to the US for foreign aid.
mds
“Unfunded mandates from Washington.”
aka
Obama [and Democrats in general]
Brown People
Welfare Queens
Unions in Other States
but gussied up a little bit with some “states’ rights” shit smeared on it.
cleek
i read reports like this, then i hover over the link… and then the disappointment sets in: it’s rarely an MSM source; rather, it’s usually a blog.
and that just makes me realize how far we have to go…
jibeaux
Well, NC has a Republican majority for the first time in, oh, 110 years, and it’s going to be ugly. Budget deficit of nearly 20% predicted, the usual balanced budget amendment, predictable aversion to extending some temporary taxes or doing anything whatsoever to actually raise money. These guys come in and to demonstrate their commitment they cut their own staff and their own staff budgets. Sure, that’s fine. By how much? About 10%. Now we will talk about all the awesome things we’re going to do to cut expenses, none of which — this is kind of a feature of Republican budget-cutting proposals, contain NUMBERS. How are you going to cut 20% of the state budget, morans, and can we talk about taxes BEFORE teachers’ paychecks bounce?
arguingwithsignposts
@Steeplejack:
Guess they couldn’t stand the weather.
hildebrand
I work for one of the UT system universities, the budget cuts we are preparing are ghastly – 15% in this biennium, and perhaps another 10% for the next.
The kicker is that the leg sat on the news of the crippling deficit until after the election – thus, Gov. Goodhair won reelection and he will promptly and completely ignore the problem as he has Presidential aspirations – piddly affairs of the state are not on his radar.
I imagine that the way out of the hole will be draconian cuts for education and a bump in the sales tax (never mentioned, of course, just enacted). They really can’t mess with property taxes because they are already exceptionally high (the trade-off for not having state income tax – which will never be discussed as a possibility).
Whatever happens will be ugly and depressing. My greatest hope is that I will be able to hang on to my job.
arguingwithsignposts
@DougJ:
Lewis Prothero probably could get a seat in the Texas Lege.
rickstersherpa
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: you forgot hippies.
But what are they going to do about it. Apparently, the poor (who are presumed to be illegals and Blacks) will take the brunt as they are seriously thinking of just dropping the Medicaid program. Of course the problem with dropping Medicaid, is that a lot of nursing home will immediately start dementia ridden old people, including a old white people, onto emergency rooms. And unfortunately for conservatives, suddenly a social issue will start making for good TV.
Violet
I’m kind of glad that Bill White didn’t win the Governor’s race. The wingnuts would just blame all this on him and Democrats. At this way the Republicans have been in charge so long in Texas that there aren’t a lot of Dems to blame.
Robert
You ask:”I wonder who will be blamed for the budget crisis?”
Easy. As a resident of what someday will become a Galtian utopia, but not until we get rid of all the parasites:
Everything is Obama’s fault. But there are a few other typical suspects.Illegal aliens, with their anchor babies, are the biggest moochers evah! But that doesn’t mean that those lazy mynortys don’t share much of the blame. If only those damned libruls would stop being such poverty pimps. And don’t forget all the lazy bureaucrats and educrats. And the damned unions. OMG, the bureaucrats and educrats are unionized. It all makes sense now.And regulations! And femiwackos and envirohuggers. And taxes! Yes, the reason we have a looming deficit is because taxes are too high.ACORN somehow fits into this equation, but I’d don’t have time to figger it out. Rush comes on in 45 minutes, and I have to get ready…
cmorenc
The story won’t get rolling on this (if it does) until the shit actually hits the fan in some dramatically tangible way that affects types of people most ordinary Texans regard as properly deserving citizens, rather than among the undeserving “other”.
Insofar as the MSM is concerned, while they’re not progressive and are too often lazy and easily captured by partisan “talking points” and “horse races” in choosing and framing issues, nonetheless one other strong tendency they’ve shown is a streak of contrarianism against whomever has enjoyed a streak of considerable recent political success, because contrasting conflict makes it easier to generate interesting stories. There’s a couple of month honeymoon period before the tide starts sharply turning. Obama was the great political success story of 2008, and after the honeymoon period, the media got lots of mileage dramatizing the developing Tea Party conflict against him. The GOP was the great political success story of 2010, and the honeymoon is still on, but let’s wait-and-see what happens by around the middle to end of March. The MSM isn’t about to go all “Mother Jones” or DKos on us, but I predict that after a stretch of gentle, easy water the GOP and its representatives in the Congress will hit some much more challenging, rocky rapids that will knock quite a few holes in their boats and spill quite a few of them into the cold water. When this happens, I won’t deceive myself that the MSM’s suddenly grown diligent or objective, but instead realize that the shiny objects they’re chasing at the moment are flashing GOP fish-tails rather than Dem fish-tails.
Ann B. Nonymous
@DougJ:
I can hear your heart beating in anticipation through the monitor.
The Texas Republican Party has actually made a few gains among Mexican-Americans there: there are now actually Mexican-American Republicans in the Texas state legislature–four, I think–and a representative from Waco, which was unaccountably Democratic for years, under Chet Edwards. His replacement is named Bill, an apparently self-hating Air Force brat who made a pile in oil, of course. He reminds me of Joshua Treviño, a little, but without the magnificent beard and with much much much more money. Much more.
merrinc
@jibeaux:
But they’re going to focus on voter fraud! I know I can’t wait to be asked for photo ID when I vote. We just don’t get enough opportunity to produce our papers.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the state (that city Raleigh loves to hate), our local paper features an article about a proposed $100 million dollar cut to next year’s school budget – right next to an article about NC’s newest reps to the US House, one of whom states that her priority is making sure businesses get tax breaks.
arguingwithsignposts
It might be a wise thing to remember that a number of Texas democrats are yellow-dog democrats.
I used to know quite a few when I was covering politics in SE Texas. They are not the same as progressives, that is for sure.
Church Lady
@hildebrand: How would raising property taxes help with the State budget? All of my family lives in Texas, in the Dallas area and own homes. Property tax bills are paid to the city that they live in, the county that they live in and I’m pretty sure that there is a bill from their Independent School District as well. None of this money goes to the State.
Just like Tennessee, increases in State revenue come from increases in the sales tax and increasing State fees on licenses, permits, etc.
Tom65
Kinky Friedman would have fixed this.
The Moar You Know
We tried the Blame The Mexican Game here in California a while back. I look forward to the inevitable results in Tejas.
Well, actually, I don’t. I like Mexicans and think they bust their balls and get zero credit for being a model minority population, but hey, the GOP has got to blame somebody and it might as well be them.
cmorenc
@jibeaux:
Actually, incoming NC State Senate leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) said (according the this morning’s News and Observer) that the plan is to give “individual department heads the chance to come up with their own cuts”. In other words, the GOP plan is to pass the buck for making the hard decisions to the various agency heads, most of whom were appointed by Gov Perdue (a democrat) or elected back in 2008.
In other words, the GOP plans to take credit for the apparent savings in cutting agency budgets by X%, but pass the blame and responsibility for allocating any damaging fallout from the cuts that tangibly affect the citizenry. In typical cowardly blowhard GOP fashion.
chopper
@DougJ:
i knew it was them. even when it wasn’t them, i knew it was them.
jibeaux
@merrinc:
This is going to be the story everywhere. If we don’t raise any money, we’re looking at teacher layoffs in the 10% and up range as it dawns on these window-lickers that there’s not actually an inflated and expensive bureaucracy to cut when it comes to schools — the great big old piece of pie in the schools’ budget is actually labeled “teacher salaries”. Hoocoodanode, right? My kindergartner started the school year with 26 kids in her class, some of them take their naps with their heads on their desks because there’s no room on the floor, and the cafeteria serves lunch from 10:30 to 2:00 to be able to get everyone through. You cut 10% of the staff while the enrollment goes up another 10% and we might as well quit paying taxes and just drop the kids off at Monkey Joe’s for the day.
arguingwithsignposts
@Church Lady:
I’m not certain, but is Robin Hood still in effect in Texas? That might be a part of the problem with education funding.
The Moar You Know
@Church Lady: You again. Let me explain how it works, as we went through this in California many years back.
Money collected from property taxes goes to local facilities and services – pre-Proposition 13 in California most of it went to schools, but a lot of it also went to local road maintenance, cleanup, public utility maintenance, cops, fire departments…that sort of thing. Your local services. When the citizenry in California decided to cut their noses off to spite their faces (Proposition 13) all those costs didn’t go away – they had to be borne by someone and it was the state that picked up the tab.
Raise property taxes in California to the point where municipalities are paying for their own school systems and local services again and you’d lessen the state budget by about 30-40%. We wouldn’t have a debt, we’d have a staggering surplus.
Your family’s property taxes are currently paying for a share of the services that they receive as citizens of the Great State Of Texas. If they pay more, the state pays less. If they pay less…the state pays more.
If you don’t like your property tax system, and it sounds like you folks carry a fairly heavy burden for the privilege of owning a home, you might want to start agitating for a state income tax. As long as you don’t allow the rich to slip out of paying their fair share, you could use those revenues to offset the property tax burden and make things easier for homeowners, especially those on fixed incomes.
jibeaux
@cmorenc:
I saw that, but what does that mean? Does that mean every agency in the state will be presented with a directive to cut 20% of their budget? If there’s going to be cuts, I don’t have any particular problem with asking the people most familiar with their operations if they can come up with budget savings rather than making the decisions for them — I don’t think Phil Berger has any idea about what, if any, efficiencies could be achieved in, say, the Office of Tourism — but I have a real problem with ruling out taxes, looking into the eyes of a projected deficit that big, and just completely dodging the question of where that number is going to come from with a bunch of platitudes and generalities that do not contain numbers. If they’re proposing that there be across the board spending cuts in every aspect of state government, let’s hear it. If they’re proposing eliminating things entirely, let’s hear about it. But the problem is once you pinning down those statistics and people figure out you’re talking about laying off 10% of teachers, throwing the mentally ill on the street, etc., then folks soften on taxes and dammit, there will be no taxes.
Sko Hayes
I don’t think Texas has an income tax (please correct me if I’m wrong), and if they create one, we could see a Democratic come back (HA!), but if they cut Medicaid, there will be a lot of nursing homes in serious trouble.
mantis
ACORN!
Omnes Omnibus
@mantis: No, those are corn nuts.
Lee
Having lived in Texas my whole life, I’ll share a few random thoughts on this.
Texas was solidly Blue until the early 90’s, then it turned to solidly Red very quickly.
The Texas governor is the weakest of all governors (by design), most of the power lies with Lt Gov.
As someone else pointed out, it is really a good thing the Republicans are currently in charge so when the shit hits the fan here in Texas they will get all the blame.
Taxes cannot be raised in Texas without an election. So actually raising taxes is going to be very very difficult and it will be the Republicans that will have to lead the campaign to raise taxes since they are in charge. That should make for some hilarious Faux News coverage.
The problem with blaming the immigrant here is Texas is that since we have a large percent of native Texans a lot of Texans have Mexicans in their family. Yes Gov. Goodhair and a few other idiots want their screen time on Faux News and like to blame the immigrant. Both most people understand that South Texas is still Texas.
jwb
@jibeaux: I agree. This is going to be a huge story once the legislators have to start making decisions. At the moment, everyone is still in denial, which is why you haven’t heard that much about it, though it’s been clear since at least last spring that this would end up being at least as bad as California, possibly worse. I’m actually surprised that the deficit predictions haven’t been increased more: the $25 billion figure had been floated well before the election, and I had assumed that even that had been lowballed. At this point, I don’t see any way Texas escapes without doing every draconian thing other states have tried and then some. At the same time, the cuts are going to go so deep that they will be significantly hurting the Gooper’s natural constituents, even the well-heeled ones, so if you don’t live in Texas and especially if you don’t draw a paycheck from the state, it should be quite entertaining watching the Goopers squirm.
slag
I’m just wondering when Mel Gibson and Tina Turner will show up.
plasticgoat
Republicans have complete control of the lege in TX thanks to the Democratic turncoats who switched parties immediately after the election. They own the problem. Bill White repeatedly brought this up during the Governors race but it was conveniently ignored by the media outlets within the state. The next few years will be interesting to say the least.
jwb
@arguingwithsignposts: Yes, Robin Hood is still in effect, and primary and secondary education is financed primarily through property taxes. Community colleges are also financed through property taxes.
Lee
The way the property tax thing works here in Texas is a bit of a mess.
You get two bills (just paid mine). One from the county and one from the ISD. The one for the county pays for roads, bridges, etc. The one for the school district pays for schools. We still have Robin Hood in effect so the rich school districts have to pay a portion of their revenue to the state so it can apportion it out to the poorer districts.
I’m pretty sure the state also portions out the money from the federal government.
I’m not sure how much the state actually kicks in to the local ISD from its sales tax revenue.
The state taxes here in Texas are a sales tax and licensing, registration fees, etc.
There will never be an income tax in Texas.
David Brooks (not that one)
Teachers! Teachers in the rest of the country are unionized, so it must be teachers’ fault.
The poor want Medicaid? Are there no (private) prisons? Are there no workhouses?
Jay C
@ DougJ:
Shouldn’t this be “mega-majority in the Legislature”?
@The Moar You Know:
The problem with the “thinking” behind Proposition 13 in CA, unfortunately, was that by legally limiting the level of taxation, and thus (presumably) the level of revenue the State could collect, those “costs” you mention could be MADE to “go away”; since the fundamental political philosophy of Howard Jarvis (may he rot) and his trogloditic followers was that ANY government expenditure – save, maybe for police and jails – was bad, wrong and unnecessary – and had to be maximally limited, by law.
The downside/drawback to this, of course, is all too obvious; and the Prop 13 mentality hasn’t, of course, gone away (become stronger, actually, in a large subset of the population) – but as long as there is at least one political party in this country vigorously pushing the “no-tax, small-government” fantasy as a “viable” alternative to financing our First World lifestyle (as a nation), deficits and debt be damned; we’ll be on the financial edge, if not over it.
With Republicans reminding us that it’s a Good Thing.
Linda Featheringill
Nice title. Good song. :-)
fourlegsgood
@hildebrand: I’m in the same boat. They’re going to gut education because they hate the universities – universities are full of pointy headed liberals who vote democratic anyway.
Maude
@Omnes Omnibus:
WIN
Alwhite
@arguingwithsignposts:
Molly always said “Most Texas Democrats would be a Republican anywhere else.” Gad I miss her
hildebrand
@fourlegsgood:
Indeed. And in the case of the university for which I work, filled with students who happen to be 90% brown. Pointy-headed liberal brown students? The folks in the Hill Country and other blood red areas, have nightmares filled with such folks.
arguingwithsignposts
@hildebrand:
Interestingly enough, at the Texas university where I attended, many of the students were stupid conservatives even in college – they listened to Rush back when Reagan was in office, and they’re wingnuts to this day AFAIK from their facepalm posts.
Gutting education doesn’t just gut the pointy-headed liberals. It guts all those galtian overlords in the business, health and economics depts. too.
terraformer
@cleek:
Right.
Whenever I see an ass-rippin’ kind of article, it invariably is from some great writer who isn’t Very Serious. Or if it were from someone VS, it would include the cursory inane attempt at “both sides do it.”
cmorenc
@jibeaux:
In principle I would have no problem with cuts being determined by cooperative consultation between the agency heads and key legislators in the budget process. However, in practice we shouldn’t be naive about how this is tactically going to play out, especially given your other observation about GOP legislators “ruling out taxes”. The GOP legislators in fact will tactically attempt to use this deferential delegation of hard decisions to minimize or even avoid responsibility for any unpopular, damaging hardships that result from the budget cuts. Just as with GOP House members at the federal level, the big talk about budget austerity has so far been unaccompanied by much talk about hard, specific choices about which specific items (large enough to have meaningful results) will need to be cut, especially those which will inflict painful hardships.
Will
As an N.C. state employee, the problem with these cuts is that the state has steadily been cutting services and jobs for the last five years – at least. Agencies are already doing with less and operating on reduced staffs.
Fat’s gone. Meat goes next.
Pococurante
@Lee:
We turned Red as a result of immigrants.
White ones, from Chicago, California, Detroit, NYC, etc. Many of these were middle to upper middle class types who wanted to
duck community responsibilitypay lower taxesthat benefit just themselves, and move intowhite-folks only enclavesmoral and high values communities thatknow God loves only high-income caucasiansworship Jesus.Zandar
Woot.
satby
@Pococurante:
…and child support deadbeats. Don’t forget them. It was a prime reason my ex moved there, enforcement during the 90s was so lax, even as measured in the general laxness of enforcement of those years.
Edward G. Talbot
So, brown people, teachers, and the poor will be caught in the crossfire?
KenZ
Actually, the TX state controller looked at the effects of dropping Medicaid in reaction to the Affordable Care Act. According to the Republican Treasurer’s Office, it would add about $5B to the state deficit annually.
El Cid
Fuck ’em. Tell Texas’ kids to go to work and hand them bullshit Texas schoolbooks to learn about Jesus & dinosaurs and how Ronald Reagan created the Grand Canyon with his tears upon seeing how beautiful was Morning In America. Or call all the suspicious-looking ones illegals and throw them over the border to Mexico.
Felonious Wench
@arguingwithsignposts:
Yellow-dog Texan here, raised by two yellow-dog Texans. Voting Republican in my family is grounds for being disowned. It’s not about The South. Yellow-dog now means a completely rejection of the current Republican party.
Our Texas Republicans have always been as crazy as the ones you’re seeing nationally now. We burned that bridge a long time ago. Any Republican is guilty by association. We just got here many years ago.
I will revoke my yellow-dog stance when the Republican party becomes sane, i.e. quits basing its platform on appeasing the religious right. Ain’t seen it yet. My parents? No way in hell they don’t vote Dem straight ticket. Ever.
Hell, I even own a yellow lab for good measure.
Lee
@arguingwithsignposts:
I also am a graduate of A&M :)
shortstop
I clearly remember several wingnuts gleefully touting Tejas as an example of a fiscally conservative and fiscally ass-kicking state not more than a year ago. Unfortunately I can’t remember who exactly said this, so I can’t go back and torment them with it.
Felonious Wench
@Lee: I have 2 kids in the Fort Bend school district. I received a letter in the mail from our superintendent asking us to please call our state reps and tell them additional cuts will cause X amount of cuts to the FBISD budget, and we’d need to get rid of X amount of teachers and programs. They included phone numbers and a website to access.
I don’t know if other districts are fighting back too. But if it’s happening in Fort Bend, chances are others are wading into the mess as well.
Barkley G
Another Vote for ACORN.
Sure they don’t technically exist anymore, but that’s why they are so dangerous.
walt
@shortstop: Off the top of my head, I remember Art Laffer making that argument in a Wall Street Journal article stating that “.. the states without income taxes were attracting people and growing faster than the other states.” Some talk radio guy , Rusty Humphries, was reading Laffer’s column and he was praising Texas in his monologue as an example of a state that “gets it.” I also remember getting a viral email forward from some GOP buddies about how great Texas was when it came to economics, budgets etc.
PWL
Who they gon’ blame? Why, that Jew-boy House Speaker! He ain’t no Christian! An’ everbody knows all Jews are closet Commies….
Calouste
@shortstop:
Probably the same people who were touting Ireland as a model that should be followed.
Lee
@Felonious Wench:
I am in a school district with lots of money (Frisco ISD) and votes very red so there will be no contacting the state to whine about budget cuts.
It is going to be a blood bath for the less fortunate districts.
Bill K
The $25 Billion shortfall is over the 2 years of the budget, while the $95 Billion is one year of the budget, so the shortfall is 13% not 25%
Mnemosyne
@KenZ:
I doubt that’s going to stop them. Look at the Congressional Republicans who are bound and determined to repeal the ACA even though it reduces the deficit by $100 billion.
The Texas deficit is the excuse to get rid of Medicaid and damn the consequences. Sort of like here in California where the (former!) Governator proposed getting rid of home care for disabled people, only to discover it would actually cost the state more if the program was ended because those people would then have to go into nursing homes, which were much more expensive than having a home health aide go to someone’s house.
But it didn’t matter to Republicans — sticking it to those lazy disabled people was more important than the actual budget.
Keith G
Yup things are and will be bad down here, but at least the price of oil is going up so the bottom will not be as low as it would otherwise have been.
God bless Dick Cheney.*
aaron
Texas’s deficit is bad, but certainly not as bad as California’s. The main difference is outstanding state debt–while Texas may have a harder time trimming its deficit, it also has a higher credit rating and less debt at the moment. In addition, California is almost certainly underreporting its pension obligations.
So Texas’s situation is better than California’s, which is the equivalent of being more fuel efficient than a hummer.
BombIranForChrist
I work in the video game industry, and Tex-a$$ is one of those places that gives a lot of subsidies to tech industries, touting itself as “pro-business”.
I am guessing that will dry up now …
maus
Isn’t the state in luck, all these are “entitlements” and can be purged without consequence!
Adrienne
@Edward G. Talbot: Second verse, same as the first!
Lee
@BombIranForChrist:
It will be drying up unless you are a contributor to Gov. Goodhair’s campaign.
CircleSquared
@arguingwithsignposts: Splendid quote selection, demonstrating, as if we needed it, the comfortable relationship between traditional religion and protofascism. Or so I claim.
The Shadow
I wish you’d stop linking to Zandar, his blog is awful and he’s a known sock puppet liar who is just looking for hits.
Stop feeding him.
Rekster
@Legalize: All one has to do is read the comments from any article dealing with the budget, healthcare, education or many others to know it’s The Mexicans.
Here is an interesting Editorial from Tuesdays DMN:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/DN-health_0105edi.State.Edition1.3d90031.html
Take a gander at the title!
Edward G. Talbot
@Adrienne
Word. SRV is one of the great things to come out that wonderful and horrible state.