By F. Scott McCown
When the legislative session began in January, Texas faced a crisis. The state was short roughly one-fourth of the money needed simply to do what it was already doing. The Center for Public Policy Priorities was part of a broad coalition that pushed for a balanced approach to the problem -- one that used the Rainy Day Fund in combination with targeted cuts and new revenue.
Others pushed for a cuts-only approach that slashed things like the number of teachers and payments to nursing homes. Initially, the House proposed a devastating cuts-only budget. In the end, with a slightly improved revenue projection and various one-time measures, the Legislature largely funded the Senate’s modestly better, but still damaging budget.
Texas is growing twice as fast as the nation. In the most recent decade, Texas’ child population growth accounted for over half of the child population growth in the entire country, making our state’s education system critical to our country’s future.
Contrary to any spin you’ve heard, the Legislature actually cut spending on public education. And the money the state is spending won’t go as far because of enrollment growth and higher costs.
How does Texas turn this around? We’ll need more than a stronger economy to solve our revenue problems. While the Great Recession created a larger revenue crisis than usual, Texas has spiraled downward yearly with one round of cuts in important services after another because our revenue system doesn’t produce the money we require to meet our needs.
Honest budgeting won’t be enough. The right and the left have criticized the Legislature for using accounting gimmicks, diverting dedicated money, and relying on one-time measures. In reality, though, if our elected officials stopped these budgeting practices immediately, it would mean less money, not more, for Texas priorities. That conservative elected officials feel compelled to resort to these practices even in the face of withering criticism is strong evidence of our state’s desperate need for revenue.
Pitting our priorities against each other is not the solution either. Texas is already one of the lowest spending states in the country, with over three-fourths of everything we spend going to education and health and human services. Saying we could easily pay to educate our kids if we didn’t have to provide grandma health care is as helpful as saying we could easily provide grandma health care if we didn’t have to educate our kids.
Of course, the “shrink-the-government folks” are clever enough not to attack grandma directly. Instead they attack Medicaid. But Medicaid is very efficient, beating the cost of private health insurance.
So when people say we wouldn’t have a problem if we just spent less on Medicaid, what they really mean is we wouldn’t have a problem if we just denied more people health care. Certainly our nation must figure out how to keep people healthier for less money, but providing fewer people health care is not the answer.
If a stronger economy, honest budgeting, and pitting priorities against each other aren’t the answer, what is? Texas must modestly increase taxes. No one is suggesting that Texas become a high tax state, but Texas must raise the money needed to invest in education and other building blocks of a strong economy. As a group, Texans pay low taxes, and as a percentage of our economy our contribution has been falling.
This is not a question of living within our means. Texans have the resources in our trillion-dollar economy to meet today’s needs and build a prosperous future. But until we fix our tax system, we can’t make important investments for the common good.
The issue isn’t whether to increase taxes, but how. Our state’s major tax is a sales tax on goods -- a tax designed for yesterday’s economy when we sold more goods and fewer services. The business tax is also flawed -- redesigned in 2006 to help pay for a property tax cut, it instead leaves us $10 billion per biennium short. And our state has tax giveaways and loopholes galore.
Between now and the 2013 legislative session, Texans must square our shoulders and do two things. First, we must solve some technical problems -- how do we modernize the sales tax, reform the business tax, and address tax giveaways and loopholes so we have a smart and fair tax system that produces adequate revenue. Second, we must work together to build the public will for a tax increase. There’s no other answer. Texans can handle both the truth and the task.
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McCown is executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities.
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Copyright (C) 2011 by the Texas Lone Star Forum. 7/11
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