Lawmakers have no excuse to skimp
Forget the feuds: Focus on funding better education, health care access and COVID relief.
One of life’s small pleasures is to peer into your pocketbook or wallet and discover that what you thought was a dollar bill lurking in the folds is actually a 20. As the 87th session of the Texas Legislature convenes this week, lawmakers are experiencing something of a macroeconomic equivalent. Despite the fiscal perils of the coronavirus pandemic, the state’s budget outlook is better than officials thought it might be, state Comptroller Glenn Hegar announced Monday.
In August, Hegar had projected that lawmakers would be glumly staring into a $4.6 billion abyss when they convened in Austin. As it turns out, the dreaded abyss is more of a relatively modest ravine. According to the comptroller’s figures, the state is currently projected to end the 2020-21 biennium in August with a $950 million deficit. That’s not the $3 billion surplus we expected to have less than a year ago, but it could have been much worse.
Lawmakers have an estimated $113 billion to spend when they write the next two-year budget. We expect them to be prudent, of course, but being prudent during these uncertain times means making good on investments they made last session, particularly in education and health care. The “can’t afford it” rationale, always a convenient excuse for those lawmakers who see no need to plan for the state’s future, now rings hollow.
Being prudent also means avoiding hyper-partisan feuds over bathroom bills, abortion restrictions and their equivalent as advocated by such extremists as state GOP chairman Allen West. It also means ignoring hyperpartisan hobby horses like Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan for the Department of Public Safety to take over policing in Austin. The always knotty, always disputatious redistricting task on tap this session should be partisan enough for anyone’s taste.
Focus, lawmakers. Focus — on education, on health care, on helping Texans survive a pandemic that keeps getting more deadly. The Lone Star State just surpassed 30,000 deaths.
Other issues require attention — criminal justice and police accountability, planning for hurricanes and other natural disasters, water conservation — but education, health care and pandemic survival are paramount.
In 2019, the Legislature retooled the state’s school finance system, injecting $6.5 billion more into public schools and enacting property-tax relief to the tune of approximately $5.1 billion. Public schools are struggling to educate our children during a pandemic. They desperately need our support. They also need to know that lawmakers won’t renege on promises made.
Fortunately, newly installed House Speaker Dade Phelan and other state leaders have promised to sustain the state’s public education investments. Those promises include continued support for full-day pre-K in districts that offer it. It also means promoting equal access to the internet. If we weren’t aware of the necessity of both pre-K and broadband access, we certainly are now.
Broadband access is also critical to health care, another issue that demands lawmakers’ attention. Recent temporary expansions of telemedicine and telehealth care must be made permanent.
We urge lawmakers in the worstinsured state in the nation to look for ways to make sure that all eligible Texans have access to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly called food stamps). We also believe the state should at last approve Medicaid expansion, federal funding that would provide insurance coverage for an estimated 1.2 million Texans, most of them working adults. Unfortunately, Phelan said this week Medicaid expansion is highly unlikely. We implore him to reconsider. Texas is one of only 12 stubborn states passing up billions in federal funding that would help Texans access medical care in a time of dire need.
As of Jan. 12, more than 14,000 people are hospitalized for COVID-19 in Texas. The virus is not under control in Texas, and that’s the primary reason the state’s economic future remains, in Hegar’s words, “clouded in uncertainty,” despite the relatively good economic news this week.
As Dale Craymer, president of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, told the Texas Tribune this week, “the pandemic and the associated impact on state revenues means Texas faces budget challenges at the very time Texans may need government help more than ever; however, the numbers are manageable.”
Craymer also pointed out that lawmakers have more money in the rainyday fund than they did in 2011, during the state’s most recent budget crisis. The money is there, we believe, so that lawmakers can avoid cuts in education, health care and other services vital to Texans in need.
These are hard times, no doubt about it. But even in hard times — especially in hard times — we would echo Hegar in his admonition to lawmakers to address the state’s needs. Think long-term, he urged. Do what you can to lessen “burdens on future generations.”