Dig Deeper Texas

For those that missed it, Perry vetoed $154 million to pay for community college employee health benefits. From what I can tell, the veto came out of no where although Perry has accused the community colleges of falsifying information to receive the payments from the state. Shouldn’t the attorney general being doing something about it then?

Anyway, even Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is trying to restore the funding. A lot of editorials, such as the one below, have popped up pointing out that Perry is effectively increasing local property taxes.

Perry’s folly: Governor’s veto damages community colleges and contradicts his previous position | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

It is more than strange that an elected official who campaigned on a platform of cutting property taxes would cast a veto that is likely to result in the exact opposite. In an article justifying his veto, Perry noted that if community colleges are short on money, “they are empowered to raise taxes from the population they serve, not unlike a local hospital, school or utility district.” Those who wind up shouldering higher tax bills will have no one to blame but the governor.

Now this seems an incredibly obvious conclusion to me but I’m wondering why the editorial writers think that most of the population would see it as such. So far, I haven’t seen a lot evidence that cause and effect are well understood by a majority of the voting population in Texas.

Go ahead and call me elitist but I live in a neighborhood where most people definitely think that their property taxes are too high but don’t understand why it takes so long to get the local roads repaired. Cibrian won this precinct.

I’m not sure why Dewhurst is concerning himself with the issue. People around here, by that I mean Republican, values oriented, fiscal slash and burn conservatives, don’t deal with the community college. If they have to, they send their kids to UTSA. I seriously doubt many of them will make the connection of higher taxes from the community college district to Perry’s actions.

Unless someone actually makes a campaign issue out of it or the self-appointed guardians of public morality take up the cause, I don’t think anyone is going to care. Let’s see, it’s an off year for elections and since providing health insurance would probably allow women to buy birth control and increase immoral behavior, I think Perry is going to get away with it. What do you expect? After all, we live in age where cause and effect is an iffy proposition at best.

Technorati Tags: Rick Perry, Community Colleges, health benefits, David Dewhurst, property taxes, cause and effect

Filed under: Community Colleges, David Dewhurst, Rick Perry, cause and effect, health benefits, property taxes