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Oh gee...a letter written by the person running against him for governor at the time?
Perry will no doubt be pitching how he cut taxes.
Unfortunately, he did so without cutting spending.
The comptroller at the time in 2006 wrote a letter that was pretty much spot on in predicting our current budget up.
(edit)
In the interest of disclosure:
She was running against him for the governor's office at the time. As such I think it is prudent to be a bit skeptical of her claims and interpretations of events.
The letter though, is important because the budget shortfalls she predicted, even so, have materialized to bite us in the ass.
Perry got to check off the "cut taxes" box, but did so by kicking the can down the road with the Legislature.
The same kinds of short-term ups and putting off of hard decisions that is killing us at the Federal level.
I am just pissed off enough at Obama to vote him out of office, but if this guy is what the GOP is serving up, no thank you.
If anybody thinks electing this guy will be some momentous change of course, feel free to outline exactly how this kind of same-old same-old is going to do that.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 08-15-2011 at 10:33 AM.
Oh gee...a letter written by the person running against him for governor at the time?
What about the information she brings up? Sure there is hyperbole but she makes valid points.
Running against Rick Perry didn't make Carole Keeton Strayhorn any less right about the budget.
Last edited by Winehole23; 08-15-2011 at 08:34 AM.
Manny, you are correct...there were many options on fixing the budget available. In the political process there are always multiple viewpoints and in the end one finally prevails based on election results.
Strayhorn may have made some valid points but using hyperbole from an opponent of his in the 2006 governors race (without pointing that out) as "expert opinion" was classic Boutons and RG was being disingenuous at best.
Strayhorn was the State Comptroller. Hers was the official expert opinion of the time. Boutons is entirely correct to refer to it as such.
He'll blame Obama.
It's much to complicated for simpleton like darins to understand. I wonder if he knows what the State Comptroller does.
August 14, 2011
The Texas Unmiracle
By PAUL KRUGMAN
As expected, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, has announced that he is running for president. And we already know what his campaign will be about: faith in miracles.
Some of these miracles will involve things that you’re liable to read in the Bible. But if he wins the Republican nomination, his campaign will probably center on a more secular theme: the alleged economic miracle in Texas, which, it’s often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies. And Mr. Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.
So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.
It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending.
Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.
In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts.
By the way, one in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state’s small-government approach.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts has near-universal coverage thanks to health reform very similar to the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act.
So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.
For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular.
And just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a low cost of living. In particular, there’s a good case to be made that zoning policies in many states unnecessarily restrict the supply of housing, and that this is one area where Texas does in fact do something right.
But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.
So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.
If this picture doesn’t look very much like the glowing portrait Texas boosters like to paint, there’s a reason: the glowing portrait is false.
Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No.
What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.
In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.
So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/op...gewanted=print
n/m
That's one tough grandma.
Its not like it matters, anyway. No one is going to hold Rick Perry accountable for this.
Lol Krugman
And Strayhorn never mentions Texas' rainy day fund and wants to add a $1 per pack cigarette tax?
The general public will LOL when stuff like this is brought up....shows rick is more concerned with politics than with bad policy
Beg pardon, but so what? She forecast the budget deficit and the consequences correctly, four years out. So much for the Texas miracle.
Rick Perry's Campaign Strategy? Distorting His Abysmal Economic Record
Rick Perry's strategy for winning the GOP nomination – and then the White House – is simple: he'll try to get there by wildly distorting his abysmal economic record as governor of Texas beyond all recognition. The spin started even before he announced his candidacy on Saturday, when right-wing blogger Erick Erickson introduced him as the governor who had created 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S. since the “recovery” began. During the announcement, Perry went on to talk about “jobs” 11 more times.
Rick Perry can't tell the truth about his economic record. That's because, more than any other single factor, he has immigration to thank for those numbers – most of it from Mexico, and a large share of it unauthorized. You can't win the Republican nomination by bragging about being one of the states that has seen the biggest rise in Mexican immigrants during your tenure, and even if you could, it's not an economic model for the country as a whole as Mexican immigration has now slowed to a trickle.
At a June fundraiser, Perry told a group of Republican fat-cats that in his state that “you don't have to use your imagination, saying, 'What'll happen if we apply this or that conservative principle?' You just need to look around, because they've been in play across our state for years, generating real results.” On this point, Perry's correct – Texas has been a model for conservative governance under his watch.
The results are hardly encouraging. Let's take a closer look at the “Texas Miracle” that we're going to be hearing so much nonsense about it in the months to come. As I wrote back in June, the reality is that Texas is not only a complete basket case, it would be faring far worse today without the help of policies enacted by Democrats at the federal level – policies Perry lambasted as "irresponsible spending that threatens our future."
In the Journal's hyper-partisan view, the lesson to be learned is that “the core impulse of Obamanomics is to make America less like Texas and more like California, with more government, more unions, more central planning, higher taxes.” That spin was echoed during last week's GOP debate by none other than Newt Gingrich, who asked, “Why [would] you want to be at California's unemployment level when you can be [at] Texas's employment level?”
James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, scoffed at the whole narrative when I spoke to him in June, saying, “Texas has been a low-tax, low-service state since the time of the Republic,” and noting that it's “therefore impossible that this fact suddenly accounts for its better job performance over the past few years.”
Arguably the biggest sleight-of-hand in the Texas Miracle storyline, however, is that many of those jobs were a result of a huge surge in the state's population, much of it fueled by immigration from Latin America (rather than liberal -holes like California).
Perhaps the most laughable claim in this whole narrative is that Texas has been “fiscally responsible.” Perry certainly adhered to the conservative playbook, offering massive tax breaks without the deep cuts in services that might inspire a voter backlash. As a result – an entirely predictable one – the Austin American-Statesman reported that “state lawmakers have spent much of the year grappling with a budget shortfall that left them $27 billion short of the money needed to continue current state services.”
Inherent in Perry's claim to have been fiscally responsible is some eye-opening hypocrisy. In announcing his bid for the White House on Saturday, Perry said of Texas' $6.6 billion budget gap last year, “We worked hard, we made tough decisions, we balanced our budget. Not by raising taxes, but by setting priorities and cutting government spending." But, as CNN reported, Texas actually “plugged nearly all of that deficit with $6.4 billion in Recovery Act money.” On Saturday, Perry described the lifeline that spared his state as Washington's “failed 'stimulus' plans and other misguided economic theories [that] have given us record debt.”
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/152017
Perry is going to be tough to beat if he can oust Romney.
"Perry is going to be tough to beat "
The only way Barry doesn't beat Perry is that if the DNC and other Dem supporters don't bash Perry for being a lying, hypocritical, party-switching, fringe/extremist "Christian" panderer from a state full of illegals he refuses to address (because too many TX (Repug) businesmen depend heavily on cheap, underpaid, unpaid illegal immigrants).
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The feeling right now, amongst many, is they want to fire Obama and many may just want to make a change to someone different even if it is Perry."Perry is going to be tough to beat "
The only way Barry doesn't beat Perry is that if the DNC and other Dem supporters don't bash Perry for being a lying, hypocritical, party-switching, fringe/extremist "Christian" panderer from a state full of illegals he refuses to address (because too many TX (Repug) businesmen depend heavily on cheap, underpaid, unpaid illegal immigrants).
Many states wish they had their own unmiracle.
Familiarity may breed contempt, but you guys are WAY under rating Perry. He will be a formidable challenger to Obama.
The only thing that I might have embellished on a bit was the le of the thread.
She was the Comptroller, and had all the data on the budget projections.
Those projections have been rather thoroughly borne out.
I don't think it is disengenious at all to point this out, especially since the man wants to run for president.
"kicking the can down the road" seems to be his modus operendi, and that is the ing last thing we need right now in Washington.
I would feel more comfortable, if I knew a bit more about the basis on which the projections were made, but given our foibles, it seems they weren't too far off base.
You do have a point, that I should have pointed out that she was running against him, kind of a rush job on my part that I will fix now with an edit.
That said, the implication that she was outright wrong, simply because she was running against him, that *is* disingenuous, don't you think?
Or are you actually going to address the fact that the predicted budget shortfalls have actually taken place?
I never said Grandma was wrong, or that the recent legislature didn't have to deal with budget shortfalls. Whether you agree with the way they were dealt with or not, they were dealt with.
Lol at Darrins complete inability to actually address a single data point.
Wake me up when you show a grasp of any issue beyond the normal drive-by. Iphone posting or no.
No actually they weren't dealt with, that is kind of my point.
It was a hodge-podge of can-kicking half-ass measures designed for the sole purpose of getting the current legislators re-elected. I will flesh out how and why late.
Not unlike what is coming out of the US Congress.
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