“Lawmakers seek answers on Texas’ budget outlook” was posted Wednesday September 15th, by Jason Embry of the Austin American Statesman. This article talks about “a lack of clear… financial hardship the state faces.” So far Texans haven’t seen the effect of the recession, but that’s all going to change in the upcoming year. “A $1.3 billion deficit is expected in the general revenue fund at the end of the current two-year budget”; that means times are going to get tuff for Texans. Most Texans have heard that the state was doing well in the recession, but has any one asked why? The state's chief financial officer, Comptroller Susan Combs, projected that in the fiscal year that started in September of last year and ended last week, the states collections of sales tax would be a little more than the year before. According to her projections, that would be a good thing for Texas, but “in fact, during the first 11 months of the fiscal year, sales tax collections fell more than $1 billion short of Combs' projections.” Over a $1 billion deficit of tax collections is a substantial amount of money! It looks like things are going to get bad for Texans given that “the sales tax is the state's largest revenue source.” Combs does not plan on officially updating the revenue forecast before she is up for re-election, in which she is expected to get because she has no Democratic opponent. So, why the short fall? Mainly because the state “cut school property taxes by $14 billion in 2006” and used the surplus of taxes (extra money over the projected amount) from previous years to offset the tax cut. They didn’t replace the funds in the state treasury and instead of cutting spending down from 2006 to now, they kept it the same. Now the surpluses are gone and Texas has no money put away. It looks to me like Combs doesn’t even know how to balance a check book, and she is the Texas’ chief financial officer! I think this article is worth reading because it will affect all of us Texans in one way or another. If the public knew more about this issue, then maybe we could have done something to prevent this from happening. I have to admit, I didn’t know that this was going on until I read this article.
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