Before allowing our elected officials to praise themselves for balancing the Texas budget, Texans should consider how and at whose expense the state budget is balanced. We should ask ourselves who the budget really benefits, whose needs it meets, or doesn't, and what it accomplishes for the majority of our citizens, who pay for it with their taxes.
No one questions the constitution's balanced budget mandate, but what about the values, not to mention the social and economic agendas, that the budget reflects, or what it says about the politicians who shape it?
Budgets always tell a story, but the story told by the Texas budget is especially worth reading, I believe, to gain insight into the mentality, intentions and attitudes of our current legislative leadership, and to understand their priorities for running the state.
The allocations and expenditures of the Texas budget, followed to their logical, predictable conclusion, forecast continued stagnation in the social, educational and public health fabrics of Texas life. Investing the available resources of this great state in the well-being of the struggling middle-class, minorities, children and students, the unemployed, the working poor and the elderly is clearly not a priority of the executive or legislative officers in state government.
Instead, guided by lobbyists, special interests and influential contributors, state officials have ensured that the wealthy and privileged, major corporations, bankers, the political class and the well-connected are fully represented in the state budget.
Anyone who touts the wonders of the Texas budget, or proposes it as a model for other states to follow, should ask why Texas consistently ranks among the lowest of the states in crucial areas of public concern, such as infant mortality, education, access to medical care, job training, public assistance, and even distribution of food stamps! Perhaps our top elected officials can explain why food stamps, which come from the federal government, are so widely unavailable to those in need at this time in our troubled economy.
But maybe we should just be thankful for Mississippi. Without it, Texas would be ranked dead last among states in significant areas that register quality of life nationwide.
As a candidate for Lieutenant Governor, I do agree with our elected leaders that Texas' balanced budget sends an important message both to Texans and to other states, as well. That message is that our leaders are so bound to the status quo, so tied to politics as usual, and so incapable of bringing new ideas and new courses of action to state government that it's time for a change. It's time for a different approach to political leadership for Texas, imaginative and determined enough meet the challenges that now confront our state.
As Texas encounters the new world of the 21st Century, it's clear that, for all its tremendous natural assets, our state's greatest resources are its human resources. To keep pace with these remarkable times, we need a government that motivates, encourages and empowers its citizens to sieze the opportunities and realize the potential inherent in the age in which we live. To accomplish this, we must transform the current politics of the predictable into the art of the possible, which is, after all, what politics was always meant to be.
