Rick Perry (Governor Good Hair) is back to his old tactics now by promising to do what he said he would do four years ago. The problem now is finding a way to pay for his empty and shallow promises.
Perry now says that he will be fiscally conservative in his next term and that his priorities are (and have been, according to his account) education, health care and transportation.
Let’s take a look at these priorities and Perry’s stance on them:
1. Education was only a priority to Perry after Tom DeLay stuck his big head into state redistricting to keep Republicans in power for years to come. By having an unbelievable margin of control in both state houses, Perry was able to ram-rod his form of education finance reform through. The problem is, his education reform brought property tax cuts that the state cannot afford.
From the Houston Chronicle today we have:
And the GOP chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee noted lawmakers next year will need to come up with billions of dollars to pay for a cut in local school property tax rates approved this year.
His own stinking party is sweating his plan. How crazy is this? The school finance system needed to be fixed, that is for sure. But the plan put forth by Perry is fiscally irresponsible.
2. Health Care is not a priority for Rick Perry. It never has been and never will be. He is too closely aligned with the lobbyists representing HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies. According to the Dallas Morning News, Texas has the highest uninsured rate of any state at 25%. He has tinkered with Medicaid enhancements over the years, but has really done nothing to correct the uninsured problem.
There have been attempts by Perry and Washington Republicans to tie the debate for health care woes in Texas to illegal immigration, but the DMN article indicates otherwise:
Uninsured Americans don’t get the preventive medical care they need. Once they’re really sick, they enter the health care system through the most expensive pathway – hospital emergency rooms – where their treatment tends to be passed on to insured patients and taxpayers.
Undocumented workers, particularly from Mexico, are often seen as the major reason that uninsured patients cost everyone else so much money. Last month, Parkland Memorial Hospital estimated uninsured illegal immigrants are costing $22.4 million a year.
But in fact, working Texans, not immigrants, are the vast majority of the state’s uninsured.
“Seventy percent are U.S.-born, 6 percent are nationalized, and the rest are immigrants – a large percentage of whom are documented,” Dr. Malinow said. “So to say the problem of the uninsured in Texas is a problem of the undocumented or even of all immigrants is really not true.”
The article concludes by pointing out that uninsured medical treatment cost [Dallas County Hospital] Parkland $410 million in 2005, with illegal immigrants representing only $22.4 million of that number (5.5%). That is a clear demonstration that Perry has done very little about health care, and gives us little hope that he is serious about it now.
But Perry’s real priority, transportation, is likely his worst political strategy.
3. Transportation in the mind of Rick Perry means creating lucrative deals with big construction companies to build a network of massive toll roads that criss-cross Texas. Toll roads are a poor decision on the part of the governor because it creates an additional tax on taxpayers, and is more harmful to those citizens who can’t afford another form of taxation. As we just witnessed, 25% of our citizens work in such low-paying jobs that they cannot get health insurance. How does Perry expect people to afford the expansion of toll roads? It would be one thing if new roads were constructed to ease congestion and made into toll roads, but the Perry plan takes existing highways and converts them back into toll roads as a way to pay for additional construction on a different road entirely. So, if you are in South Dallas Perry wants to convert certain roads into toll roads and use those funds for highway projects in North Dallas. That is just not fair and it’s not ethical.
At the peak of this toll road plan is Perry’s beloved TransTexas Corridor system. The Houston Chronicle recently detailed the plans of the road after a court ruled that the state must release all records of negotiations with private contractors to build the system:
Perry announced the corridor plan in 2002, calling for a $175 billion, 4,000-mile limited-access transportation network built mostly with private dollars for profit but owned by the state.
TTC-35 generally would run east of Interstate 35 from Oklahoma to Mexico and would include an $8.8 billion toll road from Oklahoma to San Antonio.
The proposal has received continual criticism, despite efforts by TxDOT to reassure the public.
Farmers and ranchers have expressed concern that their property would be divided or taken by eminent domain.
Local officials feared that the corridor would draw business away from existing routes.
Others were concerned that negotiating a 50-year contract for a project of such size was being done behind the scenes.
Despite its bulk — 1,600 pages — and the numerous maps included, the master plan does not include the actual route of TTC-35.
TxDOT says that will depend on the same federally required environmental process, including public hearings, as any other road project.
If all the hurdles are jumped, TxDOT says, construction could begin in 2011.
Because the master plan supersedes earlier “conceptual” development and financial plans that TxDOT declined to reveal in March 2005, these were released Thursday as well.
The Houston Chronicle and others had filed open-records requests to see the documents, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed they should be released.
TxDOT and Cintra-Zachry then sued Abbott, asking an Austin court to exempt the plans from disclosure on grounds that they would reveal proprietary information, give competitors unfair advantage and have a “chilling effect” on future proposers’ willingness to reveal their ideas.
The lawsuit was dismissed Thursday by agreement.
The campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate and state Comptroller Carol Keeton Strayhorn had urged that the plans be made public.
Strayhorn said Gov. Rick Perry had “fought to keep Texans in the dark and his contract with a foreign-owned company to build toll roads across Texas a secret.”
Perry’s plan for transportation has all of the same characteristics of Dick Cheney’s energy plan of 2001 that to this day remains top secret.
For all this governor claims that he wants to accomplish, there is little reason believe that he will do any of it in an ethcical way, and even less evidence that he will do anything that is in the best interest of the vast majority of Texans.
Last Friday was officially dubbed “doughnut hole day” by Democrats as that was the date an average senior citizen on the most-popular Medicare Drug Program would no longer be covered. The gap in coverage was designed by the Republican controlled Congress and Administration as to force millions of Americans to absorb the entire cost of their prescription drugs without any insured benefits until they spend $3,600 of their own money.