Yep, Mom was right: Just because the other kids are jumping off a bridge doesn’t make it right. Writ large, that commonsense is found in the national economy. If Texas were to follow the big-spending, high-taxing path of all the cool liberal kids, like California and New York, we too could be facing yet again massive budget cuts and huge tax increases. No thanks.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting (subscription required) that states are facing declining revenues as their economies decline. California’s governor, the sometimes-conservative Arnold Schwarzenegger, had proposed closing the state parks, eliminating dental care for the poor (don’t get me started), and cutting $4 billion from the state’s education budget.
Texas, on the other hand, posted 9.5 percent increase in sales tax revenues. While the state’s comptroller, Susan Combs, expects the ‘pace’ of sales taxes to ‘moderate,’ this drives home a very important point. Keeping spending tightly under control in the first place is far, far better than having to make draconian cuts and economy-killing tax increases in the future.
And just like our personal lives, its better than paying off your credit card debt is never having any in the first place.
By the way, if the economy is indeed slowing down, this only highlights the need to reign in the job-killing, investment-restraining business taxes our pol
