Same song, I forget which verse.
As compared with a year earlier, sales tax collections were down 14.4 percent in November, and those kinds of returns have hastened budget-cutting talk. But what’s really driving the conversation is a decision that lawmakers made in wealthier times to put property tax cuts at the top of the state’s permanent priority list.
In 2006, facing an order from the Texas Supreme Court, lawmakers passed a one-third reduction in school property taxes for operations, committing the state to spend $7.1 billion every year to hold those taxes down. But the tax increases that lawmakers passed at the same time to replace that money — most notably a revamped business tax — produce less than $3 billion per year.
So every two years, the state has to pull more than $8 billion away from other priorities, such as public schools, universities or prisons, to pay the rest of the cost of property tax cuts. Doing so wasn’t too difficult when the state had surpluses, but now that they’re gone, the property tax cuts threaten to eat up any revenue growth the state sees, even though many homeowners never saw much of a decrease in their tax bills.
To meet the state’s commitment to hold down property taxes, to pay for an increasing number of people enrolling in public schools and colleges and joining Medicaid rolls and to replace the stimulus dollars used to pay for the current budget, lawmakers in 2011 might have to come up with $15 billion or more to balance the budget, which now totals $182 billion over two years.
If only there were some giant, irresponsible, unaffordable, multibillion dollar budget item that we could eliminate to make the deficit smaller. I just know that would go a long way towards solving our problems in the short term and the longer term. If only.