Five months after the close of the session, Speaker Joe Straus recently admitted that the Republican budget was a fraud and sham…
The money collected through the tax-swap plan did not totally offset expenditures, leaving the state with a biennium structural deficit of at least $10 billion, which contributed to the $27 billion budget shortfall that lawmakers faced in the latest legislative session. Straus, R-San Antonio, said the state “barely lived” through financial woes during the recent legislative session by focusing on spending cuts, avoiding increased taxes, delaying payments to school districts to save money and requiring that lawmakers next session deal with $4.8 billion in Medicaid costs that were not covered in the two-year budget
OK’d by lawmakers.
See, this is what I love about fucking Republicans. While Democrats knew there was a structural deficit and that the entire budget was nothing but a sidewalk shell game, Republicans blithely lied to everyone who’d listen that they could balance the budget through cuts alone. Only now do they finally have the balls to admit, ‘Hey, we totally fudged the math. Our bad!’
Of special note here should be just what a liar Mucous was for yelling constantly about cuts versus taxes. It would also be good to remember the voters of 2010 who voted straight R who actually believed the budgetary garbage and handed state government over to the largest assemblage of liars and scumbags since, well, ever. It was these dumb folks who actually believed…
1) We had a spending problem, not a revenue problem (the reverse is true)
2) That their own fat, predominantly white asses wouldn’t be effected by the cuts (again, the reverse was true)
Mucous will, no doubt, come out loudly against Straus and declare him an apostate but that’s all just a bunch of bullshit. Don’t for a second think these two don’t share the same bed.
Finally, Straus did drop this bon mot into his speech…
“We have no choice, unless we want to continue to try to grow our population and continue to shrink spending significantly,” Straus said. “I think at some point you can’t cut your way to prosperity.“
Joe, you dumb shit. A large and diverse number of people far, far smarter than you (myself included) were able to figure that and told you, every way we could, that was the case. AND YOU’RE ONLY NOW GETTING IT?
The generation of kids in public schools right now will grow up in a Texas of very limited opportunity and without the education they need because a bunch of Republicans didn’t have the balls or the brains to do the right thing.