Democrats in and beyond Texas really have no credible arguments left to them. The US government has gone in the direction of statism, producing stagnant unemployment rates, pitiful economic growth and flat overall federal revenue intake. Raising taxes will not help alleviate any of these problems, but Democrats in Texas continue to support the Obama government’s policies. California has more or less followed the statist, high-tax model and is likewise in a world of fiscal hurt. Gov. Jerry Brown’s consistent answer: Raise taxes again, so he and the Democrat-dominated legislature can spend more money. Don’t rinse, just repeat.
Meanwhile the Texas record continues to improve. Texas resists tax hikes and encourages economic development, while holding the line on state government spending. Result: Stronger economic growth, leading to an increase in revenues to the state.
Texas lawmakers will have $101.4 billion to spend in the next two-year budget including sufficient surplus revenue in the current budget to close some sizable holes, Comptroller Susan Combs announced on Monday.
Combs’ official estimate of state revenue for the 2014-15 budget came in 12.4 percent higher than two years ago when the state faced a $27 billion shortfall.
Texas has enough to cover its bills and even pick up Obama’s Medicaid tab, while preserving the state’s rainy day fund. The Obama government’s policies are unsustainable and threaten to bankrupt the nation.
As a Texan, I don’t see why we have to pick up the tab for Obamacare. Let all Obama’s tony, rich Hollywood friends donate to pay for it. After all, they wanted him re-elected so they have some copability to back him up.
Unfortunately, those Hollywood elite hire very expensive tax lawyers to send their money out of the country so they don’t have to pay taxes like us commoners.
Well, at least Obama is creating some jobs; in the firearm industry and for tax lawyers. Everyone else? Not so much. But all those unemployed will have health insurance, IF they can find a doctor or live long enough to see one.
Notice to the rest of the 49 (or is it 56?) states: watch how we do it in Texas not how they do it in California.
“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” – Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Dissenting Opinion: New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932)
Not that TX has tried anything economically novel, they’ve doubled down on what is proven to work. CA, NY, MA, CT, and even the Federal government are on the losing side of this social experiment that has been a proven failure since the dawn of time. Take from the productive and revenues will invariably fall short of the most most modest estimates. Reward the non-productive, and costs will exceed the most excessive estimates.
Thats great but….one should be careful what they publish and brag about. For those of us old enough to remember the economic successes of California many decades ago, it has not ended well for them today. As such, states who have economic success becomes people magnets. Magnets for which the state has no control what kinds of people it pulls in or how many. That old suction of centralization and consolidation thing.
Zeke, there is not a conserative Texan alive that hasn’t worried about the influx of people from failing blue states like California, Michigan and New York. But an odd thing happened on the way to the end of the election in November. Harris County (Houston), Travis County (Austin) and Bexar County (San Antonio) were less blue and more red than every before. The only two bastions of liberal group think that did not turn redder was ElPaso and Dallas.
You see, fleeing from a high tax nanny state allows one to appreciate the only truely free state left in the Union. And they didn’t leave those states because they agreed with those state’s high tax, high spend governments. They left because of it.
Just let your imagination consider for a moment what the Texas economy could do if it weren’t sending $225,390,904,000 in personal income taxes to the Feds annually.
The surge in revenue should have been obvious to anyone two years ago. The Texas Comptroller’s office calculates state revenues based on a three-year rolling average of income sources, including revenues from state lands where oil and gas drilling occurs. Oil and gas prices cratered in 2009, which is why the 2011 estimates for the Legislature for the 2012-13 biennium were so low, because Susan Combs had to calculate oil prices at about $15 below their actual 2011 levels. Once 2009 came out of the formula this year, Combs was able to raise the oil revenue estimates to be in line with what the actual prices are.
Liberals would say Texas is merely benefiting from that price increase and the surrounding growth in business due to energy drilling activities, but that would be deliberately ignoring the point that this isn’t 1973 anymore, where Texas and a handful of other states had a monopoly on energy drilling revenues due to the then-current technology. Both California and New York have huge shale deposits that could be tapped to increase state revenues, just the way Texas is doing. But Democrats and their environmental activist wing refuse to allow that drilling to occur.
Even if they had the extra $$$, based on the way both those states are run, they’d probably spend 100-plus percent of the new revenues. But the point is the two biggest Blue States could easily add to their revenue streams the same way the largest Red State does. But the Democrats running those states refuse to take that option, and would rather have the taxpayers from the other states via Washington eventually bail them out if they finally do run out of budget tricks to keep going.
– state for itself.