Ron Paul Campaign Presses Perry on Big Government Record and Fake Rhetoric

Issues open letter knocking Perry’s liberal record

LAKE JACKSON, Texas– 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul’s campaign continues to challenge Rick Perry in the lead up to tonight’s Republican presidential debate. Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton released an open letter to Gov. Perry focusing on his record as Texas head of state, pointing out inconsistencies with his new Tea Party rhetoric. See text of letter below.

Subject: Rick Perry Can’t Handle the Truth

An open letter from Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton

Dear Governor Perry,

After our campaign’s first ad highlighting your Big Government record and support for liberal Al Gore, your campaign is attacking Dr. Paul – missing the point of why your past is important.

We don’t think the fact that you used to be a Democrat is the big problem here.  The real problem is that, too often, you still act like one.  Even you yourself, Governor Perry, said of your party switch, “I will still vote the same principles, only with an R after my name.”

That’s the kind of thinking that has our country teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  We cannot afford to nominate someone who thinks the letter next to their name is more important than what they believe.

Governor Perry, let me be clear: It is not that you supported Al Gore that worries us.

It is that you supported Hillary Clinton’s health care plan.

You pushed for federal bailout and stimulus funds.

You support welfare for illegal immigrants.

You tried to forcibly vaccinate 12-year-old girls against sexually transmitted diseases by executive order.

You raised taxes twice.

And, state debt has more than doubled in your tenure as governor, pushing Texas to the brink of our constitutional debt limit.

It’s that you supported ALL of these bad ideas that are inconsistent with how most Republicans understand conservatism, yet you now try to swagger your way into the Tea Party.

Governor Perry, with all due respect, you have used great rhetoric.  But you will have to answer to the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and across the country as to why that rhetoric does not match your record.

For Liberty,

Jesse Benton
Campaign Chairman
Ron Paul 2012

The Issue with Romney is the Issues

By Max Pappas (citations in original article from FreedomWorks)

After keeping his distance from the tea party movement since its inception, the ever calculating Mitt Romney has realized he needs the tea party if he is to win his bid to be president of the United States.  So he is going to speak at his first tea party event soon.

Reminder to Mitt Romney: The tea party movement is not only a reaction to the big government policies of President Obama and the Democrats who ran Congress from 2006-2008.  It is also a reaction to the disappointment and frustration with big government Republicans like you, who ran the country too much like the Democrats for too many years.

To put it another way, we support free markets, constitutionally limited government, and fiscal responsibility and we oppose politicians from both parties who do not.

Romney does not, so we oppose him.

A few of highlights from Romney’s record showing just how unfriendly he has been over the years to the ideas the tea party holds dear (links and details further below):

• Romney distanced himself from Reagan and Reagan’s policies
• Romney didn’t like the Contract with America
• Romney led the fight for and implemented health care reform almost identical to ObamaCare
• Romney called his beta version of ObamaCare “a model for the nation”
• Romney defended the individual mandate, saying,

 “I like mandates. The mandates work.”

• Romney supports cap-and-trade “on a global basis”
• Romney worked to regulate “greenhouse gas emissions” in Massachusetts
• Romney got Massachusetts involved in a regional climate change pact
• Romney supports ethanol subsidies
• Romney wants to increase spending “substantially” on energy research
• Romney opposes the Flat Tax
• Romney refused to support the 2003 Bush tax cuts
• Romney’s claim to not have raised taxes is called “mostly myth” by Cato Institute
• Romney thought Obama’s stimulus would “accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery”
• Romney supports TARP
• Romney says there’s nothing wrong with companies asking for bailouts
• Romney supports No Child Left Behind
• Romney supports reappointing Ben Bernanke to chairman of the Federal Reserve

Health Care

• In 2006, Mitt Romney imposed a health care law on Massachusetts that served as a blueprint for ObamaCare.  NPR states that ObamaCare

“was based, almost line for line, on the Massachusetts model.”

• Obama thanked Romney for RomneyCare, saying at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Boston,

“Yes, we passed health care with an assist from a former Massachusetts Governor… Great idea.”

• RomneyCare, like ObamaCare, is based on an individual mandate, which Romney continues to defend. A presidential debate in 2008 featured the following exchange:

GIBSON: But Gov. Romney’s system has mandates in Massachusetts — although you backed away from mandates on a national basis.

ROMNEY: No, no, I like mandates. The mandates work.

• Romney encouraged a broader use of government forcing individuals to make government mandated purchases, saying,

“Everybody in our state has to have health insurance and that’s a model which I think has some merit more generally.”

• Romney’s plan, like ObamaCare, fines those who don’t purchase insurance that is officially approved and heavily regulated through an “exchange” and subsidizes with taxpayer dollars such purchases.
• Romney said of his plan, with its individual mandate, “exchange,” and heavy subsidies:

“If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be a model for the nation.”

Obama and the Democrats agreed and did so.

• The far-left was so excited about RomneyCare that Sen. Ted Kennedy made a trip to be at the bill signing and was all smiles as he stood center stage.
• Despite his previous suggestion that RomneyCare is a “model for the nation”, he is now trying to use the excuse that it was OK because it’s a state plan and states experiment. But it’s wrong for government at any level to violate our basic right to liberty by forcing citizens to buy a product as the individual mandate does.
• RomneyCare has failed, increasing health care costs dramatically. Between 2006 and 2009, cumulative costs increased by $8,569,000,000, emergency room visits are up 7.2 percent, and premiums rose 6 percent, according to the Beacon Hill Institute.
• In the wake of RomneyCare, the Wall Street Journal says Massachusetts

“is now moving to impose price controls on all hospitals, doctors and other providers.”

We can expect that nationally, too, if ObamaCare isn’t repealed.

• The Wall Street Journal offers more on RomneyCare, which they call a “fatal flaw” for this candidate, here.

Cap-and-Trade

• Romney supports a global cap-and-trade scheme and involved Massachusetts in a regional cap-and-trade pact.  Romney was caught on video in New Hampshire in 2008 having this exchange with a potential voter:

Potential Voter: Do you support cap-and-trade?

Romney: I support it on a global basis

• Romney won praise from global warming profiteer Al Gore for saying, “I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming that you’re seeing.”
• In 2008, Romney told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “there’s nothing wrong with dealing with global warming.”
• In 2004, as Governor of Massachusetts, Romney introduced the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan to reduce greenhouse gases. The Heartland Institute finds,

“Though mostly voluntary, some provisions of the plan are mandatory and will impose economic hardship on Massachusetts citizens.”

• Romney’s plan, much like the widely rejected Kyoto Protocol states its goals as
• SHORT-TERM: Reduce GHG emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2010.
• MEDIUM-TERM: Reduce GHG emissions 10% below 1990 levels by the year 2020.
• LONG-TERM: Reduce GHG emissions sufficiently to eliminate any dangerous threat to the climate; current science suggests this will require reductions as much as 75-85% below current levels.
• Having pushed carbon regulations Obama could only dream of, Romney uttered this line, which sounds eerily like what Obama would say,

“These carbon emission limits will provide real and immediate progress in the battle to improve our environment… They help us accomplish our environmental goals while protecting jobs and the economy.”

• According to Sandy Liddy Bourne of the American Legislative Exchange Council,

“The Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan can be compared to a slick advertisement with no price tag. It is packaged with the same doom and gloom rhetoric of the environmental activists and commits the state government to long-term contracts for renewable energy without the benefits of a free market check-and-balance system.”

Ethanol

• Romney makes no bones about it, he supports ethanol subsidies. “I support the subsidy of ethanol,” he told an Iowa voter. “I believe ethanol is an important part of our energy solution for this country.”

• Romney goes so far as to support trade barriers on ethanol.

• Romney also supports energy subsidies in general, unequivocally stating in his 2008 campaign platform a need for a “dramatic” increase in “federal spending on research, development, and demonstration projects that hold promise for diversifying our energy supply.”

Taxes

• Romney refused to support the Bush tax cuts in 2003.

• Romney strongly opposes the pro-growth Flat Tax. So much so that he, as a “concerned citizen” ran a newspaper ad opposing it. He said, “I’m probably not going to be recommending throwing out the code and starting over” and says the flat tax is “unfair.”

• In 2002, while Romney was running for governor, limited government activists in Massachusetts were supporting Ballot Question 1 to eliminate he state income tax. Forty five percent of the voters supported eliminating the tax, Romney opposed eliminating it.

• When Romney ran for governor in 2002, he refused to sign a no-tax pledge.

“I’m not intending to, at this stage, sign a document which would prevent me from being able to look specifically at the revenue needs of the Commonwealth.”

• Romney enacted $432 million in fee hikes and $300 million in higher taxes as governor of Massachusetts.

• In a recent “Fiscal Policy Report Card” on governors, The Cato Institute, gave him a “C.” As far as the image Romney cultivates as “a governor who stood by a no-new-taxes pledge,” Cato called it “mostly a myth.” As evidence, they cited the hefty fee increases and business tax hikes achieved through the closing of loopholes.

• Romney proposed a tax shift that would have increased taxes on SUVs.

• Romney instituted a 2-cent-per-gallon increase on a special gasoline fee that takes in $60 million per year.

Spending

• As Governor, Romney proposed a budget in 2007 that was an outrageous 8.5 percent higher than the one he proposed the year before.

• Romney, despite calls from many fiscal conservatives to keep everything on the table when looking for spending cuts, recently stated that “I’m not going to cut the defense spending.”

• Romney parroted discredited Keynesian economic thinking when he wrote in No Apology,

“The ‘all-Democrat’ stimulus that was passed in early 2009 will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery.”

• Romney sounds a lot like Obama when he says in an op-ed to what was surely a fawning New York Times audience,

I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today.

The Wall Street Bailout

• Romney supports the Wall Street Bailout/TARP program.  In his book No Apology he says:

Secretary [Hank] Paulson’s TARP prevented a systemic collapse of the national financial system.

It was intended to prevent a run on virtually every bank and financial institution in the country.

Had we not taken action, you could have seen a real devastation.

• Romney reaffirmed this position in 2009 saying, “I believe that it was necessary to prevent a cascade of bank collapses.”

More Mitt, More Problems

• Romney supports federal involvement in education, long held by constitutional conservatives as a state prerogative, offering his support for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind law. In a 2008 debate, Romney stated, “I supported No Child Left Behind, still do.”

• Romney ran on raising the minimum wage and putting in place automatic increases by indexing it to inflation.

• Romney signed in to law a smoking ban.

• Romney thinks it’s OK for companies to ask for bailouts, stating in a New York Times op-ed about the auto bailout, “It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition”

• In April 2009, Romney told The Hill newspaper that:

“We as Republicans misspeak when we say we don’t like regulation. We like modern, up-to-date dynamic regulation that is regularly reviewed, streamlined, modernized and effective.”

• On Neal Cavuto on January 28 2010, Romney supported the reappointment of Ben Bernanke to chairman of the Federal Reserve.

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Perry’s ‘Pay-to-Play’ Job-Incentive Funds Miss Targets in Texas

By Darrell Preston

Rick Perry touts Texas as home to more new jobs in the past decade than any other state. Yet the taxpayer-funded programs he has used to lure employers and finance expansion often fail to meet employment goals, according to officials and activists.

While basing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination on limited government, the governor, 61, oversees state job-stimulating funds that have provided almost $633 million to companies including retailers Cabela’s Inc. (CAB) and Home Depot Inc. (HD) and agribusinesses such as Tyson Foods Inc. (TSN) A Perry spokeswoman says the recipients have created almost 58,400 new jobs. A watchdog group says two-thirds missed their targets.

Democrats including Jim Dunnam, a former state representative from Waco, also knock Perry for using the funds to reward contributors and for delivering taxpayer money to businesses as schools and health care are shortchanged. Some Republicans have faulted the programs for inadequate disclosure and not reporting on jobs actually created.

“It’s legal plunder,” said state Representative David Simpson, a Longview Republican backed by Tea Party activists.

“You can’t avoid the appearance of impropriety when you take money from everyone and you give it to a select few,” said the first-term lawmaker. He opposes using tax money for business and said he voted against the school funding deal Perry signed.

‘Pay-to-Play’

Funding recipients have included Washington Mutual, now a JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) unit, and Countrywide Financial, now owned by Bank of America Corp. (BAC) Perry’s campaigns received at least $8,500 in donations from both political action committees and/or from individuals tied to Washington Mutual and $7,000 connected to Countrywide, state Ethics Commission records show.

“It’s a pay-to-play deal, always has been,” said Dunnam, the former representative, who was on a legislative committee that oversaw development funds.

Applicants for development-fund money “are thoroughly vetted and go through a rigorous review,” Lucy Nashed, a Perry spokeswoman, said by e-mail in response to questions about the connections between recipients and political contributions.

“The governor is interested in finding the highest and best use of the state incentive funds,” Nashed said.

Sanderson Farms

Sanderson Farms Inc. (SAFM), a Laurel, Mississippi-based poultry producer, received $500,000 in fiscal 2007 to help build a plant in Waco. Joe Sanderson Jr., chairman and chief executive officer, gave $100,000 to Perry’s campaign committee in two $50,000 contributions, in 2009 and 2010. Sanderson didn’t respond to a request for comment through an assistant.

Donors to the governor have benefited in other ways. Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who has given more than $1.2 million to Perry campaigns, won permission to build a radioactive-waste dump in West Texas over the objection of state environmental regulatory employees worried about possible water contamination.

“It seems to help if you donate to Perry,” said Craig McDonald, executive director of Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit political-watchdog group. “There’s a correlation between those who pay and those who get from Perry.”

McDonald’s Austin-based group tied $17.1 million in Perry political support to 921 appointees, or their spouses, on state boards and commissions, in a September 2010 report. The donations were made from 2001 to June 2010, the group said.

Perry, who became governor in December 2000 when George W. Bush resigned ahead of his presidential inauguration, says hisjob-creation record makes him the best-qualified to take on President Barack Obama in 2012. Perry also has attacked Obama’s economic stimulus as unfocused government spending.

Governor Oversees Funds

Under the governor, the state created both the Texas Enterprise Fund in 2003 and the Texas Emerging Technology Fund in 2005. Perry directly oversees both, as well as a third set up to aid film and television production. Such programs steer public money into businesses and promotions for sports events, as a way to boost the economy.

For example, the state plans to provide $25 million a year for a decade to bring Formula One car racing to Austin, through a program to support special events. The same fund has been tapped to promote the National Football League’s Super Bowl championship in Dallas and college basketball tournaments. B.J. “Red” McCombs, a co-founder of broadcaster Clear Channel Communications who backs the Formula One project, has given more than $170,000 to Perry’s campaign committee, the records show.

Assessing the job-creation results from the incentive programs is difficult, critics including Dunnam and McDonald say. The funds haven’t had to report the numbers of new positions produced by recipients, and there are few independent studies to compare with figures provided by Nashed.

Job Creation

The enterprise fund has spurred the creation of 58,382 jobs by investing $435.6 million, said Nashed, the governor’s spokeswoman. Perry has referred to it as the largest “deal closing fund” in the U.S.

“We’ve worked hard here in Texas to create an economic environment that attracts jobs and allows employers to risk their capital and receive a good return,” Nashed said. “Each of these jobs represents a livelihood for a Texan and their family, and helps strengthen the state’s economy.”

Only 11 of 50 recipients of enterprise fund money that had promised to create jobs by 2009 met their goals, Texans for Public Justice, the political-watchdog group, said in a September 2010 report, among the most comprehensive available. It said more than 10 percent of the 50 projects examined were terminated, 14 managed to get their agreements amended to cut employment targets and 13 simply broke their pledges. The remainder fell somewhere in between.

Conflicting Figures

By the end of 2009, companies receiving enterprise fund money listed 22,544 jobs created in Texas, according to the report. An additional 8,147 were tied to three projects that also got cash from the program. The study said Perry claimed in January 2010 that the fund had spurred the creation of 54,600 jobs.

“The jobs are just projected jobs,” said McDonald. “Our contention is that they weren’t created and may never be created.”

Since December 2000, Texas employers have added more than 1 million nonfarm positions, even as the U.S. total was little changed, according to Labor Department figures. By 2008, when state payroll employment peaked at about 10.7 million, Comptroller Susan Combs, also a Republican, said six state economic-development programs including the funds overseen by Perry were responsible for less than 1 percent of those jobs.

Unknown to Lawmakers

The number of new jobs resulting from development-fund projects remains an unknown to lawmakers.

When enterprise fund employees appeared before the Legislature, they often couldn’t or wouldn’t testify about the positions actually created, said Dunnam, a lawmaker from 1997 to early this year. Instead, the workers talked about jobs promised to result from incentive money.

“They didn’t want us to know what the actual number of jobs created was,” said Dunnam, a member of the economic development committee that oversaw the funds. “You’d just get the runaround.”

When Simpson, the Longview Republican, tried to cut off the incentive funds in May, Perry called him into his office for a meeting. Perry was “sensitive” to criticism of the programs, the lawmaker said.

“He took offense at my call for more transparency,” said Simpson, 50. Nashed, Perry’s spokeswoman, declined to comment on the meeting.

Auditor Seeks Transparency

Simpson wasn’t alone in seeking changes in reporting from the emerging technology fund.

Closed-door funding decisions should be more transparent, Auditor John Keel said in a report in April. He also said the state needed to improve so-far limited monitoring of cash recipients and cited inadequate reporting by the organizations that got taxpayer money.

The technology fund has handed out $197.2 million to 133“early stage” companies as well as $173 million in research grants to state universities, Nashed said. Actual job figures for the fund aren’t available because they weren’t part of reporting requirements, she said. The Legislature has since made such reports mandatory.

The administration follows legislated requirements for monitoring and providing data to state lawmakers “detailing the status of the state’s investments,” Nashed said.

The enterprise and technology funds require a “detailed application process” before being presented to Perry, she said.

Shared Control

Perry, along with Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst and Joe Straus, the speaker of the House of Representatives, make the final decisions on funding. Dewhurst and Straus are both Republicans.

Money for the technology fund was included in the budget for the two years that begin today, even after lawmakers closed an estimated $15 billion deficit partly by shortchanging schools and Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor.

Legislators including Simpson have questioned whether the state should be picking private companies to support with taxpayer dollars. The freshman Republican said the state shouldn’t use its resources for that purpose.

“If it was a level playing field, the market would allocate capital to the right places,” Simpson said.

Others have questioned whether Perry should be running government-funded job-creation programs as he attacks Obama’s $825 billion economic-stimulus measure.

Stimulus No Answer

“Government doesn’t create jobs, otherwise the last two and a half years of stimulus would have worked,” Perry said in an Aug. 10 speech in San Antonio. “Government can only create the environment that allows the private sector to create jobs.”

The state’s development funds “are important tools to help strengthen Texas’s economic environment, and help the state compete for jobs and investment,” Nashed said.

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Rick Perry’s Budget Hustle: How the Texas Governor Created His State’s Budget Crisis

by Lou Dubose | September 1, 2011

He Was Warned
“As of this moment, this legislation is a staggering $23 billion short of the funds needed to pay for the promised property tax cuts over the next five years. … These are conservative estimates.”

—Texas Comptroller Carole Strayhorn, warning Gov. Rick Perry about his 2006 tax reform proposal

IN HIS STATE OF THE STATE SPEECH in February, Rick Perry described the $27 billion budget shortfall confronting the Texas Legislature.

“Now, the mainstream media and big government interest groups are doing their best to convince us that we’re facing a budget Armageddon,” Perry said. “Texans don’t believe it and they shouldn’t because it’s not true.”

The $27 billion equaled 15 percent of the $182 billion biennial budget the Legislature had passed two years earlier. If not Armageddon, an apocalyptic loss of revenue in a low-tax state that provides bare-bones public services.

Perry’s statement was even more remarkable because most of the budget shortfall was a consequence of a business-tax bill he pushed through the Legislature in a special session five years earlier.

With Perry running for president on a record of fiscal responsibility (and job creation, discussed later in this article), it’s important to understand the consequences of his 2006 “business margins tax” — and to ask if the governor knew that the tax reform he proposed would undermine the state’s budgets in the years that followed.

First, some background. Texas is one of nine states with no income tax. It relies on property taxes to pay for public services — notably, to pay for public education, which consumes the lion’s share of property taxes.

Because there is no income tax, property taxes are high. In 2006, Perry called a special session to address property taxes. With no income tax, there are no easy fixes. Yet Perry found one. A business-margins tax he said would provide enough revenue to allow for reductions in property taxes.

It was evident at the time that the new tax would not deliver what the governor promised. The state comptroller, Carole Strayhorn, had her staff run the numbers on Perry’s tax-reform proposal.

“In 2007,” she wrote in a letter to Perry, “your plan is $3.4 billion short; in 2009, it is $5.4 billion short; in 2010 it is $4.9 billion short, and in 2011 it is $5 billion short. These are conservative estimates.”

The comptroller warned that “no economic miracle will close the gap your plan creates. Even if every dollar of the current [2006] $8.2 billion surplus was poured into the plan, it would not cover the plan’s cost for more than two years, 2007 and 2008. The gap is going to continue to grow year by year.” The shortfall the bill created could only be closed by tax increases, the comptroller warned, “or massive cuts in essential public services — like public education.”

“It was not only Ms. Strayhorn’s letter,” Houston Democratic Rep. Scott Hochberg told me. “Every official document predicting the state’s financial crisis at the time predicted exactly what happened.”

Hochberg, the Legislature’s resident authority on public-education finance, also warned Perry that the tax bill he was promoting would not produce the revenue he promised.

“I asked the governor about this in a small meeting amongst legislators,” Hochberg said. “His answer to me, I remember it as clear as day, was ‘Scott, use your common sense. Don’t you know that when we cut property taxes we will see such an economic boom that you will never even notice the drop in revenue?'”

Perry’s response to the Democratic legislator was candid — and newsworthy. Perry admitted that he knew that the tax reform he proposed would result in a “drop in revenue.” Perry was not alone in that knowledge.

Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst told San Antonio Express-News
reporter Garry Scharrer this past January that he, too, knew the new tax wouldn’t deliver what it promised:

“Dewhurst now says that he knew that revenue projections from the revised business franchise tax ‘were inflated’ and told Senate members in closed-door caucus meetings at the time that the business tax would not perform as advertised ‘and that we were going to create a structural funding deficit in state government.’ But Dewhurst said he also believed at the time that ‘we would grow out of it by now.'”

A state senator told me last month that Republican leaders in the Senate knew the tax they were supporting wouldn’t provide adequate revenue, and the “grow out of it” trope was their answer to questions from skeptics.

“They knew their projections were bullshit,” the senator said. “When you questioned them about it, they’d say ‘we’ll grow out of it.'”

That’s the story. The state’s Republican governor and lieutenant governor knowingly created a budget crisis.

As the state’s comptroller predicted, a surplus covered some of the 2007-2008 budget shortfall. In 2009, Perry used $17 billion of President Obama’s federal stimulus money to fill the funding gap for the following two years, and to cover a shortfall in the previous fiscal year’s budget. (Perry angrily refused $555 million in stimulus money designated for the extension of benefits to the unemployed, protesting that the federal dollars came with strings attached.)

When the Legislature convened in January 2011, the federal stimulus money was spent, and the budget shortfall about which the comptroller warned Perry five years earlier had arrived.

Public education took the biggest hit.

I asked Hochberg about the $4 billion cut from the state’s public education budget.

He said the funding gap is larger: $4.3 billion on the basic “formulas,” which have always been funded. And “a billion-plus” ($1.4 billion) in “categorical funding” to public schools — funds for teacher incentives, school facilities, pre-kindergarten grants.

Thus far, 12,000 teachers have been laid off. Add to that roughly 6,000 state employees cashiered because of budget cuts, a figure that doesn’t include university professors and other university employees who will lose their jobs because of the $1.2 billion cut from higher ed funding.

Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals were cut, and the final four months of Medicaid payments in fiscal year 2012 were not funded.

There was an alternative to the austerity budget the Texas Legislature passed in June. Democrats and some Republicans proposed tapping the state’s Rainy Day Fund, funded by oil and gas taxes, to cover part of the shortfall.

Perry, however, declared the $9.5 billion fund off limits. He ultimately
acquiesced to demands from moderate Republicans and agreed to use $3.2 billion to cover part of the current fiscal year’s deficit. But nothing for the next biennium, when the state’s public schools are short $5.7 billion.

“The governor doesn’t do anything on his own,” Hochberg observed. “The governor was only able to do that because he had a large number of House members, particularly newly elected Tea Party House members, who were willing to say ‘I’m not going to vote against the governor.’

“But, clearly, he led the parade.”

When the Legislature convenes in 2013, it will face a shortfall of $10 billion to $18 billion, plus the $4.8 billion in Medicaid expenses it failed to fund this year.

JOBS FOR SALE—By now we all know what Rick Perry is selling. He collaborates with the private sector to create jobs and to attract jobs from other states. The Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technologies Fund, his creations, have had unprecedented success.

It’s not as simple as Perry would have you believe.

The two big economic development funds Perry controls operate on a trickle-up economic theory. The state takes money from taxpayers and gives it to corporations to entice them to create new jobs.

Yet corporations often fail to deliver, and the governor and his staff rewrite corporations’ contracts to relax their job-creation requirements.

Grants are often made to companies that would move into the state or expand their workforce without a taxpayer-funded incentive.

The governor hands over millions of dollars to corporations whose executives have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.

And Rick Perry holds all the cards. The lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House have a vote on which corporations get public money. But as a state senator explained to me, neither of them has the staff to evaluate candidates for taxpayer funding.

The same senator also said he would like to know how many times the speaker and lieutenant governor have said ‘no’ to Perry. There is no public record. The governor proposes and the governor disposes, in closed meetings.

And these are scarce dollars. In a low-tax and low-services state, the zero-sum-game nature of the budgetary process is painfully evident. For example, the biggest pot of economic-development dollars, the Texas Enterprise Fund, was started in 2003 by drawing $285 million from the state’s Rainy Day Fund. The same Rainy Day Fund the governor this year declared off limits for the public schools.

The Enterprise Fund also withdrew $161 million from the Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund in 2009, at a time when unemployment taxes paid by businesses tripled and only 34 percent of unemployed workers received benefits.

Add to that the total funds appropriated by the Legislature, and you get close to $500 million, all of which has or will be disbursed by the governor.

Perry has been in office for more than 10 years, which has allowed him to use his authority to make political appointments to expand the constitutionally limited powers of his office. He is, in other words, a very strong weak governor.

Every statewide elected office is held by a Republican. And the Republican Party holds a supermajority in both houses of the Legislature.

This political hegemony has created a climate that discourages oversight of the Republican governor.

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