How Rick Perry Created His State's $27 Billion Budget Crisis

[highplainsdem]

This article is at AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/152166/how_rick_perry_created_his_state%27s_$27_billion_budget_crisis/

but was originally published for the Sept. 1 issue of the Washington Spectator:

http://www.washingtonspectator.org/articles/20110901budgethustle.cfm

-snip-

"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.

-snip-

Please read the complete article at the Washington Spectator link. I can't quote enough of it to do it justice, but it explains how the Texas GOP, led by Perry, "knowingly created a budget crisis."

[highplainsdem]

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