10.27.09

Dunnam hammers Perry, Dewhurst - GOP needs to face rality on economy in Texas

Posted in Around The State, Bad Government Republicans, Election 2010, Recession, The Budget, The Economy at 11:33 am by wcnews

Just a great retort by state Rep. Jim Dunnam (D-Waco) to GOP Lt. Gov. David Dewhursts Op-Ed last week, Texas a fiscal wonderland? Now that’s pure fantasy.

Up is down. Left is right. Black is white.

It applies to Alice once she fell down that hole and walked through the looking glass.

It applies equally to our Republican leadership in Texas.

Watching Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst accept and spend President Barack Obama’s stimulus money like drunken sailors then attempt to hide/rationalize/deny/avoid that fact, is getting more and more surreal and humorous — and more and more sad.

First, Perry slammed the stimulus and all its works in the Washington Times last February. However, he neglected to state that he had written a letter to Obama asking for the money just a day after Obama signed the bill. The ink wasn’t even dry, and Perry had his hand out.

[…]

Now Dewhurst also appears unable to stay off the Wonderland bandwagon. Dewhurst wrote a column about “How Texas lives within its means” (Oct. 21) and points out that we have a balanced budget!

Of course, we all learn in sixth grade that Texas has a constitutional provision requiring a balanced budget, so we can’t fault Dewhurst for knowing that one. And the balanced budget mandate is a good thing.

But then he falls into the same rabbit hole Perry fell in. Dewhurst brags that he “led the effort to save $7 billion to balance the revenue shortfall we anticipated this year.”

That’s interesting because Texas spent $12.6 billion more this session than last session. How you spend $12.6 billion more while cutting $7 billion is a real feat.

Incredibly, Dewhurst adds: “It’s simply political fiction that stimulus dollars were necessary to balance our budget.” Now that, folks, is what we in Texas politely call total bull.

Don’t believe me. I’m just the chair of the House Committee on Federal Economic Stabilization Funding — in charge of monitoring Texas spending of stimulus dollars. I’m a Democrat, too, so maybe you should hear from a Republican.

How about what the Republican xhair of the Senate Finance Committee told the Fort Worth Business Press last week?

“In order to balance the budget this biennium, which is $182 billion, we used $14 billion in federal stimulus money to balance it,” said State Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan. “We’re not expecting a similar amount of similar money to be available in the next two years, because the federal government just doesn’t have it. So, assuming that’s true, you go into the next session with a $14 billion hole.”

Does that sound like responsible budgeting or what? We spent all the stimulus money in such a way that we will “go into the next session with a $14 billion hole.”

The problem with much of the current Republican Party leadership is not that they disagree with Democrats. The real problem is that they disagree with reality.

By shamelessly pretending that in is out and up is down, they have spun themselves into Wonderland.

Whether you like the stimulus or not, this misinformation is getting out of hand.

Harvey Kronberg has some of the grim reality facing the Texas economy right now in his News 8 commentary, Texans won’t escape recession.

As you know, truth is the first casualty of political campaigns. The simple, unavoidable truth is that were it not for the federal stimulus program pumping $16 billion into state and local budgets this year, Texas unemployment would have hit the million mark months ago. Plummeting tax collections would have forced the firing of tens of thousands of city, county and state employees; cops, teachers, and state workers as all government struggled to balance their budgets.

You can see the effects of the million unemployed everywhere. Sales tax collections have declined by double digits in each of the last four months. That has never happened since the sales tax was instituted.

Walk most neighborhoods and you will see for sale signs popping up. Home foreclosures in Texas are surging.

Southwest Airlines posted its first quarterly loss in my memory and airport traffic continues to decline. Even the Port of Houston revenues are down almost 20 percent.

You can see the effects of the million unemployed everywhere.
Friends with skin in the game tell me that commercial real estate has another 25 percent to drop in Texas and will not begin recovery until the end of next year. Meanwhile vacancies in prime office space continue growing and vacant strip centers are depressingly common.

Not all the news is bad. In fact, we should start to feel the recovery in Texas sometime next year. But campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, next month more than a million Texans will face one of the grimmest Thanksgivings in decades.

What’s hard to figure out is, are the Republicans running for reelection in Texas just going to ignore the pain that low and middle income working Texans are facing and just hope the economy turns around? Or are they actually going to face up to the issue and provide a plan for those struggling in this economy? That should become an issue now, and we need to start hearing answers from them.

Permalink