Texas needs and deserves federal aid following Hurricane Harvey. If only so many Texans, and the state government they elect, didn’t make it so easy to point and laugh at their hypocrisy in wanting that aid after all their whining about the federal government and posturing about secession.
In a statement, [the press secretary for Gov. Greg Abbott] said this was not a moment to allow politics to impinge on the relief effort. “It’s asinine to think that after this catastrophic hurricane, the federal government would not step up to help communities recover and rebuild like it has in the past,” he said.
Asinine, huh? Note: After Sandy devastated New York and New Jersey, more than 20 Texas Republicans in Congress voted against aid. That’s after Texas has benefited again and again—as it will benefit this time—from federal disaster funding and from federal money in general:
Despite the pervasive anti-Washington rhetoric, Texas relies heavily on the federal government. About 32 percent of the state government’s revenue is federal money, according to an analysis of data from fiscal year 2014 performed by the Tax Foundation. From 1953 to 2011, Texas received 86 major-disaster declarations, the most of any state, according to a 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service.
Robert M. Stein, a political science professor at Rice University, said that “most Texans believe they send more tax dollars to Washington than they receive back,” though, in fact, the reverse is true.
But here’s the thing: Texas will keep getting federal aid because the United States as a nation is better and more generous than Texas. And that’s the way it should be. The way we should be. We shouldn’t even need to point out that Houston is a blue area of Texas to believe that.