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The State Legislature of Texas is on a slash and burn mission to cut back on the spending of the state government. After years of crowing, loudly, about how Texas was a grand success economically while the rest of the country wasn’t, the chickens have come home to roost. About 1/3 of the shortfall in state revenues is attributed to the recession, the rest mainly to changes that were made in the tax code that have, ah, not quite worked out the way it was imagined they would.
Here’s a clip from a NY Times story on the 12.3 per cent cut back in spending being dealt with by the legislature in Texas:
“The budget bill makes huge cuts to public education, nursing homes and health care for the poor. It slashes financing for highways, prisons and state parks. It eliminates full-day preschool, cuts teacher incentive pay and reduces scholarships for college students by two-thirds.”
Here’s something to keep in mind: Texas is growing by about half a million people a year. How do you cut back services on the existing population and then deal with the problems and needs of those moving into the state? The answer is that everything gets messed up, fast. As one legislator put it, the choice is between building schools or building prisons because that’s where people will end up rather quickly if there aren’t enough opportunities.
Studies and long experience have convinced many people in government that the most expensive thing you can do is to cut back or destroy basic services, because people who don’t get those services wind up costing governments far, far more in emergency hospital visits, police protection and arrests and in the costs of incarceration. Never mind. The voters in Texas right now don’t care. A lot of Tea Pot supporters were swept into office last year and they aren’t worrying about the impact of the cuts, only insisting that they have to be made.
Some of the legislators think they are getting blow back from anger at Federal spending. So what? The legislature and the governor’s office are controlled by Republicans and they have fanned the flames of that anger at every turn for their own benefit. If you spend 23 hours a day screaming and carping that the government wastes all of your taxes, don’t expect people to be reasonable on the matter in the 24th hour. Face the music, because you wrote the tune, big shot.
Texas, particularly Houston, San Antonio and parts of Dallas, is a violent place. It is going to get considerably worse, in all likelihood. What’s more, some of the businesses that have been rushing to Texas because of lower wages and weak to no unions are going to find they are losing money when their workers have to spend extra time at ordinary functions, like going to the DMV, when cut backs reduce the response time. Everything gets more difficult when you have too few people trying to handle the work load.
I lived in Texas for five years during and after college, we lived there, also, during part of my elementary school years and my family background runs deep in the state, all the way back to my great, great grandparents on my mother’s side. I don’t think I would want to be living there now. As desperate people are sent into even greater desperation by poverty, drug abuse or illness, the results can be very ugly. Plus, I’ve grown accustomed to living in a state, Maryland, where they pride themselves on running a good government system (even if it doesn’t always work out that way).
Texans can make up for some of the coming unpleasantness by friendliness and an air of hospitality, but what do you say to a student who wants to go to college when there are no more scholarships available? That and many other shortfalls can’t be covered over. Hundreds of students could have their lives changed forever and the state will not be a better place because of it.
Texas is a state where people who step over the line in violation of the smallest laws are treated very harshly. In Texas, people are hauled off to jail for writing a nine dollar bounced check. The mentality left over from the frontier days of severe punishment for people who step out of line is still alive and strong. Yet, studies have shown repeatedly that investing in helping people long before they get into the depth of trouble saves money, a lot it. Cutbacks backfire, in other words.
One of my favorite all time quotes is from Mark Twain. “Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and they deserve to get it, real hard.” That pretty well sums up what Texas has coming its way. You can get angry and ticked off about government spending all you want to, but when the chips are down, somebody has to pay for services. Otherwise, we all winding up paying in ways we didn’t even consider.
Doug Terry, 4.8.11
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