From Ballot Box, By Alicia M. Cohn – 09/17/11 – Tea Party activist David Lewis announced Friday he will challenge House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in a Republican primary in 2012.

Lewis describes himself “a devout Christian, Tea Party leader, and pro-life leader” on his campaign website. “David’s only allegiance is to God and cannot be swayed by party, individuals, or interest groups,” the site reads.

Lewis told The Cincinnati Enquirer his candidacy was prompted by Boehner’s support of a federal budget that included funding for Planned Parenthood.

Lewis participated in anti-abortion activist Randall Terry’s sit-in at Boehner’s Congressional office in February, where he and five others were arrested on charges of unlawful assembly after blocking the hallway outside Boehner’s office. Terry is the founder of Operation Rescue.

Boehner won 85 percent of the primary vote in his district last year, and took over the top GOP position in Congress at the beginning of the year. Boehner’s favorability rating dropped somewhat nationally in August according to several polls, possibly in reaction to the high-profile role he played during protracted negotiations over the federal debt ceiling.

Boehner’s next election will likely measure his support amongst conservative Republicans, especially those identifying with the Tea Party movement, following some criticism from Tea Party leaders over Boehner’s perceived willingness to compromise with President Obama and the Democrats over the debt ceiling.

“I’m not delusional. I don’t know if I have a chance at beating the Speaker of the House,” Lewis said in comments reported by the Enquirer. “But what I can do is show the Ohio voters that Boehner has a box full of empty rhetoric. He doesn’t really vote for his convictions. He’s an establishment Republican. He doesn’t believe in the tea party. He doesn’t really believe in the pro-life issues.”

Good afternoon!  I wanted to share with you our latest policy brief, “Trends in Texas Government Update: State Government Spending.”  It contrasts the approved Texas state budgets with what they would look like if the Legislature had limited spending to the growth in population plus inflation (effectively, a stable per capita cost of government).  A real eye-opener.

Click on the following link to see the actual spending trend:

http://www.texaspolicy.com/pdf/2011-09-PB40-UpdateTrendsInTexasGovernment-CFP.pdf

Thank you for all you are doing to promote liberty!

David Guenthner

Senior Communications Director

Texas Public Policy Foundation

900 Congress Ave., Suite 400

Austin, TX  78701

The faint star in the constellation of Leo has a composition that according to a theory, should not have exixted.

From Time (Health), By Michael D. Lemonick Tuesday, Sept. 06, 2011 – The star known as (deep breath) SDSS J102915+172927, in the constellation Leo, isn’t much to look at. It’s a bit smaller than the Sun and a bit hotter — but then, the same could be said for millions of other stars in the Milky Way. If not for a detailed census of the universe carried out over the past decade or so by the automated Sloan Digital Sky Survey (thus the SDSS in the star’s name), astronomers would probably never have noticed it.

But Sloan’s powerful software, which processes images gathered by a telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, flagged the star as potentially interesting despite its seeming ordinariness. The tip-off was its spectrum, the rainbow of colors that appears when starlight is smeared out in an instrument called a spectrograph. Like all spectra, this one was striped by dark lines, caused by light-absorbing elements in the star’s outer layers.

When a team of European astronomers found the star in the Sloan’s massive database, however, they realized that the pattern of lines, and thus the mix of elements, was very different from the Sun’s. And when they used the powerful Very Large Telescope in Chile to take a closer look, they discovered just how unusual SDSS J102915+172927 is. For one thing, it’s almost certainly one of the oldest stars in the cosmos. The Sun has been around for about 4 billion years, but this star has been glowing for about 13 billion. Ancient stars are inevitably worth studying because they provide a glimpse into a time when the universe was young and still forming, and this, one, says Elisabetta Caffau, of the Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg and the Paris Observatory, lead author of a study in the latest Nature, “was formed very shortly after the Big Bang,”

More to the point, however, is the startling fact that, according to conventional star-formation theory, the object people are now calling “Caffau’s star” shouldn’t exist at all. It’s very deficient in two elements — carbon and iron — that many theorists believe are critical components for normal stars to form in the first place. It’s also deficient in lithium, which is not essential for a star to take shape but ought to be present all the same. Wonders Hans-Gunter Ludwig, also at Heidelberg and Paris, and Caffau’s co-author: “Where has it [the lithium] gone?

To understand the mystery, you need just a little star science. The Big Bang created the first elements in the universe: lots of hydrogen, some helium and the tiniest soupcon of lithium. The very earliest stars — very massive, very hot and very fast-burning — were made of just these ingredients, nothing more. At the cores of these hot giants, nuclear reactions forged those three primordial elements into heavier ones, including carbon, oxygen, iron and more. When the giants exploded as supernovas, they spread the heavier elements out into the universe, where they were recycled into the second generation of stars — still mostly hydrogen and helium and a bit of lithium, but with a smattering of the new elements as well. Caffau’s should presumably be part of this second generation.

Here’s the catch: when clouds of interstellar gas collapse to form more-modern, Sun-like stars, the gas heats up because it’s being compressed. If the heat can’t be shed somehow, the compression can’t proceed all the way to star formation. Theorists had been convinced that atoms of carbon and oxygen would do this job, since they radiate heat efficiently. And in fact, the three oldest Sun-like stars yet discovered had reasonable amounts of both substances. Not Caffau’s star, though. It’s got hydrogen and helium to spare — but none of the carbon or oxygen that would have let its ancestral gas cloud shed heat and make a star in the first place.

Something is clearly wrong, but since the star undeniably exists, it’s pretty obvious that what’s wrong is the theory. “I’m an observer,” says John Norris of the Australian National University, who wrote a commentary in Nature on the new discovery. “I go out and measure things. It doesn’t bother me if it goes against existing theories. It’s the theorists’ job to explain what I see.”

He admits that he finds the lack of lithium in Caffau’s star “really puzzling” and has no clear explanation for it, but he does have thoughts about the carbon-oxygen problem. “We now have two categories of these very early stars, one with carbon and oxygen, the other without.” But the first category, he points out, includes just three examples known to science. The second has one. That’s an awfully meager basis for deciding which sort of star is normal and which is the oddball — and maybe neither one is. “The way I look at it,” he says, “Nature may have more than one way of skinning a cat.”

Skinning a cat, in this case, means at least two different recipes for making stars — just the latest surprise from a crucial time in the history of the cosmos, and just the latest argument for studying the era further. “We need more data so we can get more insight into what was happening in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang,” says Norris. A reasonable thought, especially since all of known cosmic history flowed from that critical time.

–

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2092027,00.html#ixzz1XCiKyEzn

Will a college degree that costs $2,500 a year be worth the paper it’s printed on?

From The New York Times (The Opinion Pages), David Guenthner is the senior communications director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. (Updated September 5,2011)

David Guenthner

College costs are quickly approaching a crisis point. Student loan debt has surpassed credit card debt, and the poor job market for recent college graduates is spurring a growing debate on whether a college degree is still worth it.

We believe college is very important — too important, in fact, to let such doubts take root.

Just as Texas has provided a model for the rest of the country on economic growth, job creation and other policies, the Lone Star State may now show the path forward on college affordability.

As Gov. Rick Perry said when he announced his vision for the $10,000 college degree, this will not be for every program or every campus. But there are certain programs and campuses where a $10,000-degree offering would have a powerful positive impact on encouraging college participation and completion, which strengthens Texas’s future workforce.

Nevertheless, achieving the $10,000 target will require an exploration into areas of university operations that have been ignored far too long. What role should technology play in the delivery of course content? Should tenured faculty have higher teaching expectations? Why do we continue particular programs? What are the appropriate levels of administrative staffing? Can course offerings and curriculum requirements be streamlined? Are existing facilities being optimally used?

We do know one thing: the cost of college in Texas has raced ahead of inflation and any meaningful metric on outcomes, at a 10 percent average annual rate over the last 15 years. In that light, a $10,000 degree isn’t just a wish-list item: it’s a return to tuition-bill sanity after a generation of collegiate inflation that burdens families with debt, constricts promising futures at their outsets, and curbs the dreams of our best and brightest.

THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER, By Michael Barone – I can’t remember a more stunning rebuke of a president by a congressional leader than House Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to agree to President Barack Obama’s demand — er, request — that he summon a joint session of Congress to hear the president’s latest speech on the economy at 8 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Sept. 7.

Obama’s request was regarded as a clever move by some wiseguys in the left blogosphere because that was the exact time of a long-scheduled Republican presidential candidate debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Take that, you guys!

But Boehner smoothly responded that with Congress reconvening late that afternoon, the security sweep necessary for a presidential visit would be impossible and invited the president to speak Thursday. White House officials quickly agreed, scheduling the speech at 7 p.m. EDT to avoid overlap with the first game of the National Football League season.

Not such a big deal, some people are saying. I disagree. I think it illustrates several of the weaknesses of this presidency.

One is a lack of regard for the Constitution. Congress is a separate branch of government, set up by Article 1 of the Constitution, which is not about the executive branch as Joe Biden said in the 2008 vice presidential debate. (Media outfits that dispatched dozens of investigative reporters to Alaska were apparently incapable of discovering this obvious error.)

Before last week, presidents and congressional leaders always agreed privately on scheduling presidential addresses to joint sessions before any public announcement was made. But it appears that no such agreement was made here, just a brusque announcement that had to be retracted.

Another weakness on display was contempt for public opinion. White House press secretary Jay Carney said it was just “coincidental” that the president wanted to speak at the same time as the debate. It was just “one debate of many that’s on one channel of many.”

But those with memories that go back beyond last week may recall that in May 2009, Obama scrambled to find a venue for a speech at exactly the same time as former Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to speak at the American Enterprise Institute on detainee questioning issues. Cheney coolly watched Obama on television and then delivered his own speech.

Ham-handedly trying to bigfoot the opposition is a habit with this president, not a coincidence.

A third Obama weakness is his propensity to charge his political opponents with playing politics when he is doing exactly that himself. In previewing this latest jobs-and-the-economy speech, Carney said that Obama will make the case “that politics is broken and that politics is getting in the way of the very necessary things we need to do.”

This from the president who has brushed aside one bipartisan initiative after another, from the health care initiative of Sens. Ron Wyden and Bob Bennett to the recommendations of his own deficit commission, headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.

Instead, he has taken a purely partisan course on one issue after another — and heaped blame on Republicans. He invited House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan to his speech at George Washington University and then lambasted him harshly.

Obama has been so consistently blaming Republicans in recent months for not approving the free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama that it came as an utter surprise to his deputy press secretary, Josh Earnest, that he hasn’t sent them to Congress yet.

The fourth weakness is failure to come up with policies that address situations appropriately. Press briefings suggest that Obama next week will call for an extension of the payroll tax holiday and of unemployment benefits. A case can be made for both, but neither has invigorated the economy yet.

We also hear that he may call for more infrastructure spending. But as the president himself told us, laughing, there aren’t actually any shovel-ready projects.

The New York Times reports he may call for “school repairs and retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency.” This sounds suspiciously like the weatherization program under which Seattle got $20 million and produced just 14 jobs.

Democrats have criticized Obama on the speech-scheduling flap. James Carville said he was “out of bounds.” Salon.com’s Cenk Uygur sensed “the audacity of weakness.” It reminds me of a phrase describing a character in the 1980s TV series “Dallas” — “blustering, opportunistic, craven and hopelessly ineffective all at once.”

–

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

See Other Commentaries by Michael Barone.

1. A four-year-old child, whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman, who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old Gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there.  When his mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy just said, ‘Nothing, I just Helped him cry.’

***

2.. Teacher Debbie Moon’s first graders were discussing a picture of a family. One little boy in the picture had a different hair color than the other members. One of her students suggested that he was adopted.  A little girl said, ‘I know all about Adoption, I was adopted.’  ‘What does it mean to be adopted?’, asked another child. ‘It means’, said the girl, ‘that you grew in your mommy’s heart instead of her tummy!’

***

3. On my way home one day, I stopped to watch a Little League base ball game that was being played in a park near my home. As I sat-down behind the bench on the first-base line, I asked one of the boys what the score was.  ‘We’re behind 14 to nothing,’ he answered with a smile.  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I have to say you don’t look very discouraged.’ ‘Discouraged?’, the boy asked with a puzzled look on his face… ‘Why should we be discouraged? We haven’t Been up to bat yet.’

***

4. Whenever I’m disappointed with my spot in life, I stop and think about little Jamie Scott. Jamie was trying out for a part in the school play. His mother told me that he’d set his heart on being in it, though she feared he would not be chosen.. On the day the parts were awarded, I went with her to collect him after school. Jamie rushed up to her, eyes shining with pride and excitement.. ‘Guess what, Mom,’ he shouted, and then said those words that will remain a lesson to me….’I've been chosen to clap and cheer.’

***

5. An eye witness account from New York City , on a cold day in December, some years ago: A little boy, about 10-years-old, was standing before a shoe store on the roadway, barefooted, peering through the window, and shivering with cold. A lady approached the young boy and said, ‘My, but you’re in such deep thought staring in that window!’ ‘I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes, ‘was the boy’s reply. The lady took him by the hand, went into the store, and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. She then asked if he could give her a basin of water and a towel. He quickly brought them to her. She took the little fellow to the back part of the store and, removing her gloves, knelt down, washed his little feet, and dried them with the towel. By this time, the clerk had returned with the socks.. Placing a pair upon the boy’s feet, she purchased him a pair of shoes.. She tied up the remaining pairs of socks and gave them to him.. She patted him on the head and said, ‘No doubt, you will be more comfortable now.’
As she turned to go, the astonished kid caught her by the hand, and looking up into her face, with tears in his eyes, asked her.  ’Are you God’s wife?’

***

Can you forward a smile? I think I just did.

Images were downloaded and added to this anonymous email. 

Author unknown.

By Jeffrey T. Kuhner, The Washington Times -

President Barack Obama

President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more must be done: Mr. Obama should be impeached.

He is slowly – piece by painful piece – erecting a socialist dictatorship. We are not there – yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism. Like Venezuela’s leftist strongman, Hugo Chavez, Mr. Obama is bent on imposing a revolution from above – one that is polarizing America along racial, political and ideological lines. Mr. Obama is the most divisive president since Richard Nixon. His policies are Balkanizing the country. It’s time for him to go.

He has abused his office and violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. His health care overhaul was rammed through Congress. It was – and remains – opposed by a majority of the people. It could only be passed through bribery and political intimidation. The Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, the $5 billion Medicaid set-aside for Florida Sen. Bill Nelson – taxpayer money was used as a virtual slush fund to buy swing votes. Moreover, the law is blatantly unconstitutional: The federal government does not have the right to coerce every citizen to purchase a good or service. This is not in the Constitution, and it represents an unprecedented expansion of power.

Yet Obamacare’s most pernicious aspect is its federal funding of abortion. Pro-lifers are now compelled to have their tax dollars used to subsidize insurance plans that allow for the murder of unborn children. This is more than state-sanctioned infanticide. It violates the conscience rights of religious citizens. Traditionalists – evangelicals, Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Orthodox Jews – have been made complicit in an abomination that goes against their deepest religious values. As the law is implemented (as in Pennsylvania) the consequences of the abortion provisions will become increasingly apparent. The result will be a cultural civil war. Pro-lifers will become deeply alienated from society; among many, a secession of the heart is taking place.

Mr. Obama is waging a frontal assault on property rights. The BP oil spill is a case in point. BP clearly is responsible for the spill and its massive economic and environmental damage to the Gulf. There is a legal process for claims to be adjudicated, but Mr. Obama has behaved more like Mr. Chavez or Russia’s Vladimir Putin: He has bullied BP into setting up a $20 billion compensation fund administered by an Obama appointee. In other words, the assets of a private company are to be raided to serve a political agenda. Billions will be dispensed arbitrarily in compensation to oil-spill victims – much of it to Democratic constituents. This is cronyism and creeping authoritarianism.

Mr. Obama’s multicultural socialism seeks to eradicate traditional America. He has created a command-and-control health care system. He has essentially nationalized the big banks, the financial sector, the automakers and the student loan industry. He next wants to pass “cap-and-trade,” which would bring industry and manufacturing under the heel of big government. The state is intervening in every aspect of American life – beyond its constitutionally delegated bounds. Under Mr. Obama, the Constitution has become a meaningless scrap of paper.

To provide the shock troops for his socialist takeover, Mr. Obama calls for “comprehensive immigration reform” – granting amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens. This would forge a permanent Democratic electoral majority. It would sound the death knell for our national sovereignty. Amnesty rewards lawlessness and criminal behavior; it signifies the surrender of our porous southern border to a massive illegal invasion. It means the death of American nationhood. We will no longer be a country, but the colony of a global socialist empire.

Rather than defending our homeland, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has sued Arizona for its immigration law. He is siding with criminals against his fellow Americans. His actions desecrate his constitutional oath to protect U.S. citizens from enemies foreign and domestic. He is thus encouraging more illegal immigration as Washington refuses to protect our borders. Mr. Obama’s decision on this case is treasonous.

As president, he is supposed to respect the rule of law. Instead, his administration has dropped charges of voter intimidation against members of the New Black Panther Party. This was done even though their menacing behavior was caught on tape: men in military garb brandishing clubs and threatening whites at a polling site. A Justice Department lawyer intimately involved in the case, J. Christian Adams, resigned in protest. Mr. Adams says that under Mr. Obama, there is a new policy: Cases involving black defendants and white victims – no matter how much they cry for justice – are not to be prosecuted. This is more than institutionalized racism. It is an abrogation of civil rights laws. The Justice Department’s behavior is illegal. It poses a direct threat to the integrity of our democracy and the sanctity of our electoral process.

Corruption in the administration is rampant. Washington no longer has a government; rather, it has a gangster regime. The Chicago way has become the Washington way. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a political hit man. He is an amoral, ruthless operator. It was Mr. Emanuel who reached out to Rep. Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania Democrat, offering a high-ranking job in the hopes of persuading Mr. Sestak to pull out of the primary against Sen. Arlen Specter. It was Mr. Emanuel who offered another government position to Andrew Romanoff to do the same in the Colorado Democratic Senate primary. And it was Mr. Emanuel – as the trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has revealed – who acted as the go-between to try to have Valerie Jarrett parachuted into Mr. Obama’s former Senate seat. The only question was: What did Mr. Blagojevich want in exchange?

This is not simply sleazy Chicago machine politics. It is the systematic breaking of the law – bribery, attempt to interfere (and manipulate) elections using taxpayer-funded jobs, influence peddling and abuse of power.

The common misperception on the right is that Mr. Obama is another Jimmy Carter: an incompetent liberal whose presidency is being reduced to rubble under the onslaught of repeated failures. The very opposite, however, is true. He is the most consequential president in our lifetime, transforming America into something our Founding Fathers would find not only unrecognizable, but repugnant. Like all radical revolutionaries, he is consumed by the pursuit of power – attaining it, wielding it and maximizing it. Mr. Obama’s fledgling thug state must be stopped.

If Republicans win back Congress in November, they should – and likely will – launch formal investigations into this criminal, scandal-ridden administration. Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican and ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has promised as much. Mr. Obama has betrayed the American people. Impeachment is the only answer. This usurper must fall.

–

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington think tank. He is the host of “The Kuhner Show” on WTNT 570-AM (www.talk570.com) from 5 to 7 p.m.

PAINT CREEK, Texas — It’s not hard to understand why Rick Perry hates Washington after driving along the farm-to-market roads where he was raised.

His roots are rural: He’s a farmer-rancher by trade, and his supporters say the reason he understands the plight of small business owners is because in his younger days he ran the family’s cotton farm. He rails against centralized government because he thinks it’s too far removed from the people it governs. It’s certainly plain to see that the trappings of Washington couldn’t be any farther away from the modesty of Paint Creek, where clouds of dust still blow behind the cars that travel from farm to farm, and signs other than those pointing out the names of roads are hard to come by; billboards and political displays are non-existent.

Perry’s parents still live in the house where he grew up in this tiny farming town about an hour’s drive north of Abilene in West Texas, and they don’t seem enthused by the prospect of their son, the Texas governor, running for the presidency.

“We don’t talk to reporters,” his father, Ray, said when he answered his door this week. “Y’all twist around what we say.” Despite promises to the contrary, the elder Perry had no interest in bragging about his son, although there was a small sign promoting him affixed to the window next to his front door.

On most afternoons, though, the governor’s father can be found down the road in Stamford at a dark little diner called Cliff House, which looks like the kind of place you’d find in a 1970s murder mystery set out West. RoseAnn Hill, who works at Cliff House, says he sits at the same table of coffee drinkers almost every day, arguing about politics.

Some of those who gather in the diner say that the governor’s mother, Amelia, “started walking a little taller than everyone else” when her son started running the state. But that may be about as far as she wants him to go.

“We won’t be doing anything like that,” Amelia Perry, a quilter, told Hill after all the buzz started two months ago about whether the three-term governor would seek the nation’s highest office.

But Perry can’t seem to help himself from taking his horse over the next hurdle (apologies to Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka, who cautioned national media outlets against cowboy analogies like this one).

Born James Richard Perry in 1950 — but called Rick since childhood — he was the quarterback of his school’s six-man football team, which, as Hill put it, is all there is to Perry’s town. “Paint Creek is the school; the school is Paint Creek — that’s it,” she said.

He met his eventual wife, Anita, who was from the neighboring (and much bigger) town of Haskell, and later left his hometown for college at Texas A&M, a not-insignificant feat for someone from a place like Paint Creek.

The couple met at a piano recital in grade school. And like many touchstones from Perry’s early days, the piano-playing reappeared years later in his political career: A TV spot made when he ran for state agriculture commissioner in 1990 features him holding his now-grown son, Griffin, on his lap when the boy was learning to play the piano.

That same ad shows him in a jean jacket and cowboy hat, riding a horse and telling voters he was the only farmer-rancher in the race. In other words, he understood the issues and the job because he had lived it, and that’s why his close friends in politics convinced him after three terms in the legislature that he ought to seek the statewide office. He had studied animal science in college, and the horse he was riding and the saddle he was using were his own.

Why does a balanced budget approach work?  It’s simple really.  The importance of a balanced budget amendment is that it forces the legislature, by force of law, to focus all budget discussions on reconciling spending and revenue.  We are free to reconcile by a number of means: raise taxes, cut spending, or a combination of the two.  But, at the end of the day, every budget debate comes back to reconciling spending and revenue.  As a legislature, we can never ignore it.  Even the most liberal members of the legislature are forced to work toward that reconciliation.  Otherwise, the Comptroller of Public Accounts will never certify the budget and we start all over again.

Texas runs on a biennial (two year) budget.  At the beginning of every biennium the Comptroller submits a biennial revenue estimate to the legislature.  This estimate tells the legislature the amount of revenue from taxes and other sources that will likely be available to spend.  The legislature then makes the decision on how they want to meet that estimate.  If, in years like this one, there is a projected shortfall in revenue, the prudent way for the legislature to reconcile the shortfall is to cut its expenses.  For instance, this legislative session the legislature cut spending by 8.1% from the previous biennium.  The Comptroller then looks at the adjustments in spending and revenue the legislature makes, and determines whether that amount of revenue is sufficient to cover the state’s obligations for the biennium.  If it is, then the budget is certified and put into place.

The difference in Washington is that reconciling revenue and spending is never the focus.  Instead, the debate is about spending limits. Reconciliation can be easily ignored.  Without the force of law compelling reconciliation it will never be realized and the federal government will continue to spend the futures of our children and grandchildren into oblivion.  The real difference between an Austin budget debate and a Washington budget debate is that the force of law compels Texas to reconcile our spending to our revenue.  Without this requirement, Texas legislators might be just as prone as congressmen are to want to “bring home the bacon” and escalate reckless spending in hopes of re-election.

State Representative Phil King serves Parker and Wise counties in the Texas House of Representatives.