Grading Texas

Rick Sloan, communications director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, gave an update on the nation’s unemployment picture to a group of teachers unions’ communications specialists today, and it wasn’t good.
Another 60,000 and 200,000 education jobs are projected to be lost in the United States this year, he said, as 30 million Americans remain either unemployed or underemployed. That’s one fifth of the national workforce, he said.

Sloan was in Austin to address a session of the National Education Association’s PR Council, meeting at the Driskill Hotel.

He didn’t discuss Texas’ education jobs’ outlook specifically, but Texas ultimately could have a major effect on the national figures. A lot will depend on how deeply the Legislature and the governor cut into the public education budget to bridge a revenue shortfall as high as $27 billion. One “doomsday” budget proposal laid out last week in the House would slash as many as 100,000 public school jobs in Texas alone during the next twoyear budget cycle.

That budgetary plan was based on Gov. Perry’s insistence that the shortfall be “cured” without raising taxes or spending any of the state’s Rainy Day Fund.

You may have noticed that Gov. Rick Perry – always eager to divert attention from his own failures has declared an “emergency” for state legislation that would call on Congress to pass a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now, if only he could figure out a way to cure a very real emergency. That, of course, would be the $27 billion budget hole that must be filled before Texas can meet its own constitutional requirement for a balanced state budget.

By “cure,” I mean crafting a balanced, realistic solution that wouldn’t add tens of thousands of school teachers and state employees to the unemployment roles, close untold numbers of public schools, price thousands of young people out of college, sink Texas’ bottomoftheladder health care standards even lower and wreck the state’s economy. Those would be some of the results of the budget proposal laid out in the House earlier this week to meet Perry’s orders to write a new state budget without raising taxes or spending any of the Rainy Day Fund.

Senate budgetwriters are expected to present their startingpoint budget plan next week, and it won’t be much better. The potential misery may just be reconfigured.

In all his posturing over “belttightening,” the governor would just as soon everyone forgets that a big chunk of Texas’ revenue shortfall is the direct result of his and the legislative leadership’s mismanagement. As one of my colleagues noted, executives in the corporate world normally are fired for such problems. The Texas political world, however, is obviously different.

I am talking about Perry’s electionyear scheme to cut school property taxes, which he convinced the Legislature to enact in 2006. In return for onethird reductions in school maintenance taxes and strict limits on future local increases, the Legislature passed a package of state tax increases – notably an increase in cigarette taxes and a new business margins tax – to allegedly make up the difference.

But there was no increase in public education funding. And, the new business tax – partly by design and partly because of the recession – has never raised enough revenue to close the funding gap left by the property tax reductions. That socalled “structural deficit” now accounts for more than $9 billion of the state’s $27 billion revenue shortfall.

To his credit, Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden served notice on the opening day of the legislative session that the business tax must be fixed. Whether that means being fixed to the tune of $9 billion is unlikely. Perry, so far, has danced around reporters’ questions of whether he would support any changes in the tax. And, any attempt to revise the tax to raise significant amounts of revenue will surely be greeted with howls from many business people, including some who claim to be strong supporters of education.

Time will tell how this plays out, but it is highly unlikely that Perry will declare a cleanup of his own mismanagement an “emergency.”

That distinction, based on my quick reading of the day’s news clips, belongs to rightwing activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, who views the state budget strictly in terms of big numbers and political opportunity, not actual, living people.

In a story in The Dallas Morning News about the deep cuts proposed in the initial House budget plan, Sullivan was quoted as denouncing “crisis mongering” by critics of the proposal.

“Taxandspend liberals would have us believe that all music, joy and laughter will fade away unless legislators hike spending and raise taxes,” he said.

Well, that probably won’t be the case at Sullivan’s house, as long as he can make a living stirring the pot of antigovernment folks who don’t need public health care, think they don’t need the public schools and don’t really give a twit about the future of Texas. But laughter and joy may be suppressed in the households of laidoff teachers or state employees or workingclass families who lose health care coverage for their children, real people who may become real victims to budgetcutting numbers. And, there will a lot of those if agitators like Sullivan have their way.

What’s more, parents who suddenly discover that their children’s grade school classrooms have become stuffed with 30 or 35 kids each also may find a big chunk of their joy replaced by anger.

In case you don’t know, this is the same Michael Quinn Sullivan who managed to antagonize most Republican members of the Texas House by trying to stir up public opposition to Speaker Joe Straus because Straus actually believes the world is round.

The TSTA building, only a couple of blocks from the Capitol, shook a bit when the National Guard’s cannons were fired this morning during the inaugural ceremony. I assured one of my colleagues we weren’t under attack, at least not from the National Guard. It was merely the traditional 19gun salute afforded Gov. Perry to commemorate the beginning of his umpteenth term.

Besides, the guns, even if they were pointed in our direction, were firing blanks. Unfortunately, as far as the public schools and school teachers were concerned, so was Perry’s inaugural speech. In four and onehalf pages (doublespaced) of text, the governor devoted one sentence to anything that could be construed as public education.

It was, “We must continue investing in our people, developing young minds, grooming and attracting the best and brightest in the fields of science and medicine, giving individuals the tools and the freedom to prosper.”

Wow. That line almost set the podium afire.

Predictably, Perry spent many more sentences bashing the policymakers in Washington, vowing to cut spending and predicting a miraculous (if would have to be) new century of historic success for our state.

An inaugural address is supposed to be thematic, laying out an officeholder’s priorities in broad strokes. If so, education is very low on the governor’s agenda. Indeed. Maybe those big guns were pointed at us, and maybe the loud boombooms were a notsosubtle message.