Texas Scorecard by Michael Quinn Sullivan December 31, 2021
It’s easy to forget that great things take time.It has taken decades, but earlier this year – with almost no fanfare – the Texas Legislature finally passed a strict limitation on the growth of state government spending. This didn’t happen overnight.
In the 1970s, there was a move led by a former California governor named Ronald Reagan to limit the growth of government – to control the leviathan of the state by controlling its diet. Texas lawmakers, eager to capitalize on a national trend that wasn’t disco pants, did what Texas lawmakers almost always do: the absolute minimum. The spending limit enshrined in the Texas Constitution had the words without the substance, limiting nothing. In fact, lawmakers completely ignored what token limitation it provided for the next decade and a half.
That’s when a firebrand lawmaker named Talmadge Heflin, a Republican from Houston, took the state to court to enforce the application of the limit. As meaningless as the limit was, Heflin’s action put the tool on the radar of grassroots activists. Over the next twenty years, conservative activists made using, and then strengthening, the state’s spending limit a top priority.
Legislative efforts driven by citizen activism toiled on, reaching fruition in 2021 when legislation putting a tight lid on future state spending was adopted. Of course, it doesn’t actually take effect until the 2024-2025 state budget that will be adopted in 2023
Since the effort began in the 1970s, a nagging question has been what to do with the surplus money – that delta between what government gets in taxable revenue and how much of it they can spend. The easiest answer, giving the money back to the taxpayers, now has practical application.
More:
https://texasscorecard.com/life/committed-to-the-fight/
