No Cliffs in Texas

I am both amused and saddened by the gyrations at the federal level to find some bipartisan compromise between spending, taxing and programmatic cuts.  Do you remember the supercommittee of 2010 appointed to find a way to increase our debt ceiling, reduce our spending, and balance the long term budget?  Do you remember that conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats would not go along with the recommendations?  Do you remember that to raise the debt ceiling in 2011 the idea of a fiscal cliff was invented to allow fiscal conservatives to vote for raising the debt ceiling and postpone the long term solutions until the end of 2012 with a host of horrible fiscal consequences if we did not?  Well, we still have no long term solutions and are not likely to and we ran right up to the edge of the cliff.  Solving our economic issues will take sacrifice and compromise on all sides.  Something we are not likely to do any time soon.  Something we are structured to avoid with a Republican House, Democratic Senate, and a Democratic President.

Meanwhile, there are no fiscal cliffs in Texas.  There is no need to play Russian roulette with our budget, no need to blackmail another side into compromise.  That is because there is not another side.  Texas has resolved the problem that the federal government cannot, and we have done so because only one party has clout in Texas.  The House, Senate and Governor’s Office are all Republican controlled.  The Texas Constitution mandates a balanced budget.  It mandates no state-wide property tax, no state income tax.  We are a right-to-work state so we do not have public sector unions.  We are classically positioned for the conservative approach to fiscal issues.

And what is that approach?  If revenue declines, government spending declines.  If revenue declines there is no consideration of additional sources of revenue, so government spending declines.  We will always have a balanced budget.  And, it will always be balanced using public education dollars.

Public education is the single largest line item in the state budget.  The same constitution that forces a balanced budget and no state-wide taxes also requires the Legislature to provide a free and efficient public education system.  If revenues drop, the Legislature cuts spending for education.  In fact, they cut spending in all the social service areas.  There is not an opposition party to block it.  And, educators are not an interest group.

(It will not always be this way.  As the demographics of the state continue to change the state is much more likely to become Democratic again as it was from the Civil War until the 1980’s.  That will be interesting.)

Our Legislature meets once every two years for 140 days.  It will convene in Austin on Tuesday with the state in much better financial shape than it was 2 years ago.  Two years ago the Legislature helped balance the state budget by cutting $5.4 billion from the education budget.  Will they restore the cuts?  Will they increase education funding for the next two years?

I don’t think so.  We are not approaching a cliff of any kind.  There is really no pressure to increase funding or even return funding to previous levels.  We will remain ranked around 40^th in the US for expenditures on public education.  And, while we are at it, we will find ever new ways to divert those precious public education dollars to private sector enterprises like charter schools.  There is even a bill to allow parents to take their public education dollars and use them to enroll in a private school, aka, vouchers.

Nope, no cliffs in Texas.  The educational financial landscape here is a gradual slope downhill.