He’s a really impressive candidate.
Mike Collier
What I’ve been surprised by in the past two years is how much farther right the state has gotten, even compared to someone like Rick Perry, who has, I think, been conservative by any normal standard. When Combs came back in 2013 reporting an $8.8 billion surplus—to me, that was a red flag that we cut the schools budget $5 billion by accident in 2011, or perhaps not by accident; perhaps in an abundance of caution that should raise some eyebrows.
Here’s my perspective on that. When the Eighty-second Legislature sat in January 2011, she showed up with a Biennial Revenue Estimate that showed a deficit that surprised everybody. It should have been a red flag to everybody: maybe this estimate isn’t right. If you look at the state’s economy, even in the document itself where she transmits the news, page 1 says we’re going to have less in revenues, which leads to the deficit. Page 2 says the good news is that we grew in 2010 and we’re going to grow in 2011 and we’re going to grow in 2012 and we’re going to grow in 2013. Anybody with any finance sense should have said, “There’s something really wrong here.” And my opponent didn’t say, “I think there’s something wrong here.” I’ve gone back and looked at the revenues coming into the treasury at the time. If you did a quarter on quarter analysis—this past quarter versus a year ago—you would have seen that revenues were roaring in. She should have at least stopped and said, “How do we manage our way through this uncertainty?” I think it was politics, and unacceptable.
I tend to agree with that, although within the Lege, I think there were people on both sides who were trying to maneuver their way through it, because they were logistically constrained by what the comptroller had projected, or maybe they were politically constrained. So they wrote a budget knowing they would backfill the budget. But there were also some who genuinely didn’t understand, and maybe some who felt genuinely cautious because it’s better to have a surplus than a shortfall.
You know, Erica, what I think this all boils down to is that if you’re a politician, you struggle with all the political implications of what you do. But if you’re a chief financial officer and you’re not a politician, it suddenly becomes very simple. You think of it the way a real executive would think of it and say, “These are the numbers; these are the uncertainties; these are the possibilities.” You don’t have to go through all of that political stuff. But you have to have a comptroller who’s not a politician to do that. And that’s, I think, what makes this so compelling to Texas voters. When I tell the story, the response I get—this whole notion of what party am I running for—just dissolves when I tell that story.
Go read the whole thing, it’s worth your time. I believe it’s a bit naive, albeit quite normal for an idealistic first-time candidate, to think that you can remove political considerations from inherently political processes. Revenue forecasts rely on assumptions, and assumptions are colored by one’s beliefs. Be that as it may, some forecasters are justifiably more trusted than others, and that’s a function of transparency and fidelity to verifiable facts. I feel quite confident that anyone who listens to Mike Collier will come away feeling good about his ability to make reliable forecasts. The key is whether he can get enough people to hear what he has to say. I actually got a genuine snail mail fundraising pitch from Collier the other day, and I plan to send him a check. If he can raise $5 million or so, who knows? What I do know is that the more voices like Mike Collier there are out there, the better off Democrats as a whole will be this fall.