Our very own local golden boy, House Speaker Dustin Burrows, has teamed up with Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to demand a mandatory 3% budget haircut for state agencies, appellate courts, and public universities. Why? Because according to Abbott, nothing says “putting families first” quite like making sure state services operate under strict standards of starvation. The trio is framing the move as a masterclass in fiscal conservatism designed to pave the way for more property tax cuts. Because everyone knows the one thing Texans want more than functional state infrastructure is a tiny tax break to offset their skyrocketing home insurance.
The absolute chef’s kiss of this entire situation is that Texas isn’t even broke. In fact, the state is actively hoarding a record-breaking $24.8 billion in its Rainy Day Fund and just passed a $338 billion budget last year using a massive $24 billion surplus. But god forbid we spend that cash on minor things like public higher education. Universities across the state are already desperate enough to be cutting dozens of academic programs and offering employee buyouts to stay afloat. Don’t worry, though—the state’s precious new private school voucher program is completely exempt from the cuts, proving once again that funding private education takes priority over keeping public universities functional.
Meanwhile, as the Big Three pat themselves on the back for their “responsible governance,” Texas taxpayers are about to get blindsided by an $826 million bill from the federal government. Why? Because the state has a staggering 9.34% error rate in processing SNAP food benefits—with more than 60% of those mistakes caused by the state’s own understaffed workforce. Naturally, the brilliant solution from Burrows and company is to squeeze the budget even tighter, ensuring state workers will be even more overwhelmed, errors will inevitably spike, and the feds will fine us even harder.
But hey, look on the bright side: at least when college students are crammed into a 500-person lecture hall with fewer staff to help them graduate, they can rest easy knowing Lubbock’s finest helped keep the state safely anchored in artificial scarcity. After all, who needs a well-funded university or functional food assistance when you can boast about a fiscally conservative utopia built on a mountain of unspent cash?
Source:
