What recession? Texas rakes in $10.7 billion surplus (Houston, Austin: loan, layoffs)

[Lakewooder]

What recession? Texas looking at $10.7 billion surplus | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

"The nation may be on the verge of a recession, but the Texas economy is doing well enough for Comptroller Susan Combs to predict Tuesday that the Legislature will have a $10.7 billion surplus when it convenes in January..."

[awecelot]

Yet TXDOT is running out of money for our roads...

[imaterry78259]

Do we have the wrong Congress in Austin? How doe we have such a windfall and the road expansion, so call new taj mahal schools and new bridges are needed. We need an indepedent citizens watchdogs to see how the funds are used

[Soccersupporter]

Originally Posted by imaterry78259

Do we have the wrong Congress in Austin? How doe we have such a windfall and the road expansion, so call new taj mahal schools and new bridges are needed. We need an indepedent citizens watchdogs to see how the funds are used

Absolutely! How can you have a surplus with still many things that need to be done. Weird!

[Trainwreck20]

Budgets are based on projected income....so if income exceeds the projections, then there is a surplus. There is also a school of thought that the if budgets were based on need (and if you needed more, you would have raised taxes), and if you get more in taxes than you needed, the taxes are too high and should be reduced/refunded.

[KantLockeMeIn]

Originally Posted by imaterry78259

Do we have the wrong Congress in Austin? How doe we have such a windfall and the road expansion, so call new taj mahal schools and new bridges are needed. We need an indepedent citizens watchdogs to see how the funds are used

Look at how the people vote for almost every bond referendum put up for vote. This past year it was endless. I'm all for cancer research, having many family members affected by the disease... but that's why I donate money to research organizations. But the voters of Texas thought it was worth going into debt to fund $3 billion dollars for research.

I think anyone who wants to vote for an increase in spending should be forced to write a symbolic check for their portion at the time that they vote. If those who voted for it had to write a check, their portion each would be $4492 to cover the $3 billion dollars and $1497 to cover the interest.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman once said that people spending other people's money on other people is the least effective way to spend money.

[Philosophizer]

we need to seceed before the United States falls apart and brings us down with it. that being said, we need to boot Perry out of office too. I'm not comfortable with that guy running our independent nation.

[love roses]

I tried to boot him out in the last election, but I guess there were still too many people who wanted him to stay.

[texdav]

From the surplus Perry seems to be doing a good job. Certainly better than California were they are deep in the hole from way over spending.Now they face deep cuts in many programs and stae employee layoffs.You will note that perry has lowered property taxes but many counties have in fact raised evaluations.But because of stae law they can only raise you taxes by 10% increase based on the evaluation increase.

[HappyTexan]

Well they need to loan TxDot some of those surplus funds since TxDot seems to have misplaced theirs and have no more to fix our existing roads.