Only 40% Of Texans Support Accepting Stimulus Money
You gotta love Texas.
The plurality of Texas voters (47%) support Governor Rick Perry’s opposition to accepting the state’s $17 billion share of the national economic stimulus package.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 40% think the governor should accept the money, and 13% are undecided.
Perry is one of several Republican governors who don’t want the money, primarily because he believes it will create new programs that state taxpayers will later have to finance to keep going. Democrats in the state are urging the governor to take the federal money.
Governor Perry’s concern over the stimulus creating unnecessary and expensive government that must be supported by taxes paid by Texans once the “stimulus” money runs out is a valid one, and something I worry about here in my home state of North Dakota.
We came into the current legislative session with a $1 billion+ surplus. A lot of our budget for the next two years is already written. Our Governor has already his spending suggestions clear, and it’s hard to imagine (the never-ending mewling of bureaucrats aside) that there is a single project or agency in the state that is suffering from a lack of sending. Now we’ve got over half a billion dollars in federal money coming to us on the big government gravy train, and what is going to happen to that?
It should go to fund the tax relief our “Republican” political leadership says we can’t afford, but I suspect it will be thrown down to the various state agencies who will then invent ways to spend it. Which, of course, will grow government. And once the stimulus money runs out these same bureaucrats will be clamoring for more funding for all the new government the “stimulus” created.
And indeed, I’m already hearing rumblings from within the various state agencies that most of them have no idea what they’re going to do with this money.
Which makes me wonder why our “Republican” Governor John Hoeven didn’t have the same sort of conviction Governor Perry does in saying no to this unnecessary spending.
