Given that polls show Gov. Rick Perry with comfortable leads, it's fitting that he'll have to clean up his own mess.
Texas faces a budget crisis of truly daunting proportions, with lawmakers likely to cut sacrosanct programs such as education for the first time in memory and to lay off hundreds if not thousands of state workers and public university employees.
Texas' GOP leaders, their eyes on the Nov. 2 election, have played down the problem's size, even as the hole in the next two-year cycle has grown in recent weeks to as much as $24 billion to $25 billion. That's about 25 percent of current spending.
The gap is now proportionately larger than the deficit California recently closed with cuts and fee increases, its fourth dose of budget misery since September 2008.
On the chopping block:
"They'll have to cut," said former Rep. Talmadge Heflin, R-Houston, the House's budget chief during the last budget meltdown, in 2003. "When you look at the big numbers, I just don't think there's any way that you make it match without making some reduction in education, both higher [education] and public education," or grades K-12.
Republicans rejoice! That education stuff is problematic, and they have an excuse to cut further. That way, they can go from being last in the country, to being even more solidly behind Mississippi. Don't mess with Texas!
So why the budget shortfall? Because of that cure-all Republican policy solution:
Ongoing expenses, including property tax cuts passed four years ago, cost between $95 billion and $100 billion in state funds, now that a federal flow of stimulus cash is winding down.
It's always about tax cuts, because in Republican-dominated Texas, one would be hard-pressed to blame "out of control spending".
