Peacock- "It May be Time for a Zero-Growth Budget in Texas"

When the Texas Legislature met in 2003, it appropriated $115.4 billion of your money. Last year, in its most recent session, it appropriated $258.2 billion.

In other words, in the last 16 years, Texas state government spending has more than doubled, increasing by $142 billion.

The rapid increase in spending continues. The $258.2 billion the Legislature appropriated last year was up $40 billion, or 18.3 percent, over 2017.

That is not what the government will tell you, however.

The Legislative Budget Board reported last May that state spending was up only 6.3 percent, or as low as 4.2 percent if one removes spending on schools for property tax relief. While those numbers are accurate as far as they go, they employ various methods to mask the extent of actual spending growth.

For instance, instead of looking at all the money appropriated during the session as a whole, it breaks down the spending into biennia, or two-year budget periods. Then the Legislature backloads money into the current biennium, which raises the baseline and thus lowers what they report as the spending increase for the upcoming biennium.

Also thrown into the mix is the claim that spending has stayed below the state’s constitutional limit on spending growth. Again, that claim is accurate. Yet the limit allows much more growth than is healthy for the economy, and can only be accurately calculated more than two years after the Legislature has left town. There is almost zero accountability.

As you can see, it gets complicated. If you do not understand all this, that is actually a design feature, not a bug. The more complex, the easier it is to hide the spending growth.

Perhaps, though, it is time for some simplicity. How about the Texas Legislature adopting a budget that does not grow at all? We have tried zero accountability. Why not a zero-growth budget?

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