It’s gotten messy in Texas

The Texas miracle is starting to look like one of those Virgin Mary-shaped burn marks on a tortilla: pretty exciting until it goes stale. With the Lone Star State facing a budget shortfall comparable to California’s — a state that right-wing pundits have derided for years as a mismanaged liberal tax trap — it might be time to concede that conservative fiscal policies aren’t necessarily the cure-all their apologists pretend them to be.

Texas officials have been able to conceal the bad news until recently because they pass a budget only every two years, so they got a free pass in 2010. Now, facing a $27-billion spending gap (about a third of the budget), and with a statehouse jammed with conservative lawmakers who would sooner trade in their pickups for Priuses than raise taxes, the legislature must consider devastating cuts to schools, Medicaid and public assistance programs.

California is obviously in no position to gloat. Although voters here will have the option of approving modest tax hikes, the Golden State’s $25.4-billion budget hole will force similarly unpleasant cuts. But nobody was claiming Sacramento to be a paragon of fiscal virtue. Business interests inside California often point to Texas, which has lower corporate taxes, no personal income tax and an approach to environmental regulation that is considerably more lax, as an example we should seek to emulate. So do Texas politicians. Gov. Rick Perry enjoys boasting about all the California businesses lured to his state by the friendlier taxation environment, recently completing a five-day trip here trying to entice a few more. Perry also likes to rail against the federal economic stimulus program even though his state only managed to balance its budget in 2009 with the help of $12 billion in stimulus grants.

It is undeniably true that it’s easier to find a job in Texas, with an unemployment rate of 8.3%, than in California, at 12.5%. But an awful lot of those jobs are the sort of low-paying posts you’d expect in a state that ranks No. 42 out of 50 in per-pupil education spending. Among wage-earners in Texas, one-third make too little to stay above the federal poverty line for a family of four, roughly double the percentage of such low-wage Californians. Businesses certainly are attracted to places with low taxes, but they also need an educated workforce and functioning infrastructure. It’s questionable how much longer they’ll be able to find that in tax-averse Texas.

Schadenfreude aside, we don’t envy Texas lawmakers the choices they’re facing. There aren’t any easy solutions for the problem of how to keep government services running during an economic downturn. We trust, though, that we’ll be hearing fewer claims that all the answers are to be found in Austin.