A little bit of good news.
State coffers will be bit plumper than previously expected, Comptroller Susan Combs announced Monday, but her outlook for the Texas economy is less optimistic.
Texas is estimated to collect $1.6 billion more than was budgeted for 2012-13, the two-year budget that started Sept. 1. The comptroller’s report provides the first official state revenue update since January.
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The driving force behind the additional state dollars is improved sales tax collections, particularly in the oil and gas industry, according to the report.
Sales tax revenue from the mining industry, which includes oil and gas, was up 72 percent in the previous fiscal year. The industry also created 17.3 percent more jobs, while the rest of Texas’ industries combined had job growth of 1.9 percent .
But Combs cautioned against expecting that kind of robust growth going forward. Industry job losses in 2013 are expected to wipe out any gains in 2012, she said.
“The Texas unemployment rate — as low as 4.3 percent in early 2007 — is now at 8.4 percent and giving no indication of receding rapidly,” Combs said.
You can see Combs’ letter to state leaders about her revenue update here. This is better than the alternative, but it’s not going to do much to mitigate the cuts we experienced this spring. Mainly, if things continue on this pace, it means that at least the next Lege won’t have to start out by closing a deficit left over from the prior biennium, as this one did. Make sure you understand that when you read stories like this.
After a long run of tough times brought on by a sour economy, Texas lawmakers got some good news Monday as the state’s chief fiscal officer projected a $1.6 billion surplus that could provide a much-needed financial cushion for the next session of the Legislature.
The windfall available for the fiscal biennium that started Sept. 1 was generated by better-than-expected state revenue. It could enable lawmakers to partly offset a $4.8 billion shortfall in Medicaid and soften some other cuts enacted during the 2011 Legislature, analysts said.
The new projections by Comptroller Susan Combs will make things easier for budget-writers at the outset of the next legislative session in 2013, although lawmakers will still face a host of financial challenges.
Combs projected available revenue of $82.7 billion by the time the biennium ends on Aug. 31, 2013, which would give the state a $1.6 billion balance over the $81.1 billion in the two-year budget approved by this year’s Legislature.
Lawmakers entered the 2011 session facing one of the biggest shortfalls in years.
They ultimately enacted an austere budget that cut spending by $15.2 billion over the previous biennium and reduced state aid to public education by $4 billion.
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Dale Craymer, president of the business-supported Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, said Combs’ report offers good news for lawmakers. In passing the $172.3 billion budget, lawmakers left Medicaid underfunded by $4.8 billion and expected to tamp down the shortfall by drawing from the state rainy-day fund in 2013. Craymer said lawmakers can use the surplus to partly meet the Medicaid obligation.
Combs projected that the rainy-day fund will reach $7.3 billion by the end of 2013.
Eva DeLuna Castro, an analyst for the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for programs for low-income Texans, said the surplus means that lawmakers “will have a little left over” to deal with Medicaid and restore $250 million in general revenue cuts. But she said the amount is not big enough to deal with broader financial issues, including state policies that critics say have created a permanent “structural” deficit. She called Combs’ projection “mediocre at best.”
This report has to do with this biennium. Other than ensuring that there should be enough in the Rainy Day Fund to handle the massive Medicaid short-changing and not requiring a second dip into the RDF to close the books on this chapter, it doesn’t really tell us anything about what conditions to expect for the next biennium and the budget that legislators will have to write for it. I fully expect there will still be a large deficit, quite likely another eight-digit shotrfall, because the underlying structural deficit of the business margins tax not paying for the 2006 property tax cuts is still there. Some healthier sales tax numbers aren’t going to make a dent in that. We also have no idea what may result from the various school finance lawsuits, but since they will be arguing (among other things) that the state is not adequtely funding public education, you can expect that to put some pressure on lawmakers to find more revenue. And of course the kind of lawmakers we have in place for when that comes up will have a huge effect on the kind of solutions, or “solutions”, that are found. We’ve got a long way to go before things change.
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