The wisdom of the rainy day fund in Texas

NY Times:

Some States See Budgets at Risk as Oil Price Falls

Gas prices have fallen below $2 a gallon in Houston. The Texas economy is more diversified than in the past, but a gloomy forecast includes a warning about a drop in the state’s home values.
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Gas prices have fallen below $2 a gallon in Houston. The Texas economy is more diversified than in the past, but a gloomy forecast includes a warning about a drop in the state’s home values.
A study projected that job losses tied to the decline in energy costs would be largest in Wyoming, Oklahoma and North Dakota.
Texas has a diversified economy and has also experienced the ups and downs of the oil market for decades.  While Democrats wanted to spend the surplus accumulating in Texas, Gov. Perry and the Republicans in the legislature refused to do so.  They will probably loosen the purse strings a little in 2015 to improve roads that have seen heavy use because of the oil boom.  The local governments near the boom have been much more conservative during this one too.

The education lobby in Texas is pushing for more spending by using the courts, but I think the lower court ruling will not survive a hearing with the Texas Supreme Court.  Texas schools are out performing most in the nation even though their budget growth was restrained during the recession.  That should be a lesson for the future.  If funding was the answer then Washing D.C. would have a decent system which it does not.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more