This morning on the Texas Tribune’s front page:
The story is simple enough: Texas is facing a budget deficit of somewhere between $12 billion-$18 billion, and the big three in our state government (Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, House Speaker Joe Straus) want to cut our way out of the hole. They have already applied a “no new taxes” pledge to this session’s budget-writing process.
For the state to cut its way out of the hole, though, we’d have to start closing prisons or schools or, as Straus has obliquely suggested, withdraw our state from Medicaid.
The impressively jowly Talmadge Heflin has quite a history in this debate: in 2003, he was the chairman of Texas’ House Appropriations Committee when the legislature came up against a $10 billion deficit. The budget that Heflin and Perry pushed has since resulted in a disastrous experiment in privatizing state services (which ended up costing more money than it saved), more than 350,000 children cut from the State Children’s Health Insurance program, and a broken eligibility determination system for public services that will likely wind up landing Texas in court.
In the likely event that Perry, Dewhurst and Straus are all re-elected in November, and the legislature continues to be GOP-dominated, 2011 will be a replay of 2003, except worse.
