It was only a matter of time. The so-called “conservative” Texas Senate is really a populist body with a social conservative agenda. The fearless ego leader of the Senate, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, has always been a populist behind his rhetorical conservative front.
The Lt. Gov. and his minions are now proposing to break the spending cap in Texas so that they will have more money to spend. But they don’t want to do it directly, they want to trick the voters of Texas into doing it for them. From Robert Garrett of the Dallas Morning News:
A constitutional spending limit, though, is starting to bite. The steep reductions to spending lawmakers passed in 2011 re-set the spending base at a very low level. And fiscal hawks and tea party activists have made it a litmus test of purity that lawmakers not let spending rebound to pre-recession levels, especially if it’s also adjusted upward to cover inflation and population growth.
The answer to Senate budget writers’ dilemma? Amend the state constitution so that tax cuts and paying off bonds early do not count toward the cap.
(click here to read the entire piece on the Dallas Morning News website)
This reminds me of an argument that then radio host Dan Patrick had with then Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Patrick was railing about the Rainy Day Fund, insisting that the money belonged to taxpayers and should be refunded to them rather than sitting in an account with the state. Dewhurst patiently explained both the need for the fund and the fact that the spending cap made it too expensive to do.
Some of you may be thinking that tax cuts shouldn’t count against the spending limit but you need to rethink that if you are a fiscal conservative. The whole purpose for populist Dan et. al. to propose this is so that they can spend more money. That’s right, SPEND MORE MONEY without taking a vote to spend more money.
Once again, Erica Grieder of Texas Monthly is all over this nonsense. In her post titled So Much for Fiscal Responsibility, she takes the Senate to the fiscal conservative woodshed.
Aman Batheja, at the Texas Tribune, summarizes the idea: the Senate’s budget writers are suggesting that money spent on paying down state debt and lowering property taxes not be counted towards the spending cap. This is an alternative to the current options: spend less money, or voting to bust the cap. Patrick’s explanation is telling:
“We have more money on hand than we believe any Legislature has ever had at one moment in time dealing with budget issues,” Patrick said. “There is no support for exceeding the spending cap but that also means that when we leave, we will have approximately $4.5 to $5 billion in the state’s checking account.”
Well…yes. That is, as it happens, how the spending cap is designed to work. It’s also why voters amended the Texas Constitution to include a spending cap in the first place. As Batheja notes, the spending cap has often been redundant, historically: the Texas Constitution’s pre-existing pay-as-you-go provision means that the Lege doesn’t necessarily have enough money to write a budget that would bump up against the cap, which is set by the Legislative Budget Board based on projections about population growth, incomes, and inflation. Sometimes, however, the state coffers are flush; in those cases, the purpose of the spending cap is to keep the government from going on a spending spree.
The fact that we have such a provision in the Texas constitution is a measure of the state’s longstanding commitment to fiscal discipline.
(click here to read Grieder’s post on Texas Monthly’s Burka Blog)
What I want to know is this: where is that “Tea Party Advisory Council” to Lt. Gov. Patrick? Why are they silent? Could it be that they are populists too? Hmm.
Thank goodness we have a conservative Speaker of the House, Joe Straus:
“For 36 years our state spending cap has helped enforce fiscal discipline, and we should be very cautious about any attempt to weaken it,” Straus, R-San Antonio, said in a statement.
Fiscal conservatives need to stand against these types of flagrant attempts to bankrupt the state.
Fishie says
There’s a reason I’m not back on the Tea Party Caucus Advisory Committee.
Fat Albert says
Unfortunately Mr. Patrick has slowly been losing his conservatism ever since first being elected to office. He’s become far too interested in everything that he can do with the power of government and very uninterested in actual conservative principals.
Fred Flickinger says
Although I would perfectly happy to leave the money in the Rainy Day Fund, I am a bit confused as to how tax cuts are considered spending. In order for tax cuts to be considered spending, you must believe that all money belongs to the government, therefore failing to extract money from those who earned it, can be counted as spending.
Regarding counting the early payment of bonds as spending, my question is, Was the expenditures made when the bonds were originally issued considered spending? If so, how can the original expenditure and the repayment of the debt incurred, both be considered spending? Was the money received by issuing bonds considered revenue?
Call it whatever you want, but paying down debt is the most fiscal conservative action possible and an action rarely taken by any elected official regardless of label!
david jennings says
Fred, you couldn’t be more wrong. First, it is important to remember that the proposal is not a tax cut, it is called “tax relief”. That is because your taxes will rise due to appraisal creep – no one is proposing rate cuts because they cannot -that is done at the local level.
Certainly paying off debt is conservative. And the TX Senate can and should do that. But they should not do that by tricking the public into letting them spend more money.
Busting the cap allows the TX Senate to spend more taxpayer money and allows government to grow. Period.
That is not fiscally conservative, no matter how much you slice and dice it.
Fred Flickinger says
When I am taxed less, I call that a tax cut. Whether the reduction is due to a decreased tax rate, decreased valuation or an increased exemption, makes absolutely no difference. I fail to understand your point about about creeping evaluations. This will always be the case unless you eliminate annual evaluations. Even if the tax rate is decreased this problem still exists. If you are advocating an elimination of annual evaluations I would fully support that. Our current process is too costly and returns little value.
I still disagree that an early payment of previously incurred debt, a tax cut or tax relief is an expenditure.