Why the Commerce Department?

[Username17]

Here's the breakdown:

Texas collects over sixty different state and local taxes and fees, many of which generate money that is nominally earmarked for something or other. These taxes collectively generate about 78 billion dollars (in 2008, it's about 80 billion now). In addition, they receive $224 billion dollars from the federal government, and have a fucking ginormous structural deficit because they actually spend $335 billion dollars.

Check it out: this year, the Texas state and local combined deficit is Two Hundred and Fifty Five Billion Dollars before Uncle Sugar (represented by the federal government) pours $224 billion dollars into the giant money sieve that is Texas. Giving them an actual deficit of "only" $31 Billion dollars.

But to claim that education is paid for by home grown Texan money is basically laughable. The pile of money coming from the feds is almost three times the pile of money generated by their actual taxes. Without the federal allowance, not only would there be no money in the budget for education, there wouldn't be any money for anything at all. Not that there actually is any money, because a year-to-year deficit that is more than a third of your entire revenue is obscene. California is spazzing out with a budget deficit of $9.6 Billion dollars.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

Frank, I'm pretty sure that the $200B+ deficit quoted in the second link is the total accumulated deficit. Which can get pretty big, as California also has at least $260B total debt:

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-19/o ... -liability

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And this site agrees that Texas is not spending $300B+ annually:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/sta ... population

Putting state AND local spending at $183B annually, and a total debt at around $200B on top of that.

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Now, part of the Texas budget is indeed paid for by the Federal government, but note that that the Federal government also collects income tax directly from Texan citizens and puts it directly into the Federal government coffers:

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fede ... s=b&rank=T

Which totals $189B annually, or more than enough to pay for all of the spending. On top of that you have the local revenues via state and local taxes, which amounts to...

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/comp ... e_2011bF0a

Another $150B.

Now, there's apparently some overlap between the $189B collected by the IRS and the $150B state/local revenue (the Fed kicks some if not most of the IRS money back to the state), but all in all it's pretty silly to say that Texas is smooching hundreds of billions of dollars off the Federal government... when the Federal government collected nearly $200B from Texas through the IRS in the first place.

Your second article pretty much correctly sums up the deficit:

Over the next two years, the state faces a budget shortfall of between $15 billion and $27 billion over the next two years, depending on who is doing the calculation

That $15-$27B just gets added to the $200B+ total debt/deficit, which had been accumulating over the past decade. That's also just around 10% of their current total spending levels, which jives with fbmf's claim that Texas only sources 10% of its money from "Federal" dollars (albeit it's more correctly classified as out-of-state dollars).

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(For comparison also using the above same sites... California spends $400B annually, and has $371B in debt, but a mere $273B in IRS revenues. It does have much higher local/state revenue at over $300B, but again note that some of it is just IRS money kicked back by the Federal government)

[Username17]

Frank, I'm pretty sure that the $200B+ deficit quoted in the second link is the total accumulated deficit. Which can get pretty big, as California also has at least $260B total debt:

Debt and Deficit are not the same thing. Like, at all.

Deficit is the amount you are spending minus the amount you take in. In one year. Debt is the amount of cumulative Deficits you have accumulated over forever plus whatever interest you owe on that.

When they say 255 billion dollars in deficit, they literally and specifically mean that they are spending 255 billion dollars more than they take in in taxes this year. The difference is made up with federal transfers (224 billion) and bond issuance (31 billion added to the debt).

It is totally possible to have a negative Deficit (called a surplus) and still have a large debt left over from previous years when you ran a deficit and sold bonds to cover the difference. Italy is in that situation right now. It is also theoretically possible for a country or province to have negative debt - to run a surplus and then put that money into bank accounts or bonds. Although in practice that rarely happens.

But Deficits are still Deficits and Debts are still Debts. You'll note that the reports on tax collections and the reports on spending and the reports on deficits really do add up:

335 billion in spending minus 80 billion in state and local taxes equals a 255 billion dollar deficit. For this fucking year. Good thing the Federal government is there to pay 88% of that this year or Texas would already be in receivership.

Texas is super fucked. And Rick Perry running on the Texan economic miracle was hilarious even before "Sorry, Oops".

-Username17

[tzor]

Solar power is never going to generate power as efficiently as nuclear, especially a terrestrial-based solar power system. Even in ideal conditions, a solar plant works for only about half a day every day .

That's not exactly true. I'm pretty sure we can get the right technology within a decade. There are new super black materials on the pipeline and the price barrier is sure to drop down significantly within five years.

What does this mean? Well, let's say we can break the barrier enough and make the technology enough to have the stuff be as good as or better than roof tiles. We then put them on every house.

This is actually a win win. AC power demand is precisely WHEN THE SUN IS SHINING. In addition, if the sunlight is converted into energy well it didn't get converted to heat in your attic.

Yes, it's not going to save the world, but it is going to solve peak demand.

Remember Solyndra crashed and burned not because it was possible, but because China is funding theirs better than we were (because we were basically fethering the pockets of the corporate executives as opposed to deliberately undercutting the cost of the panels). Even then, the technology is currently borderline at best.

[sabs]

China is playing the undercut, drive out of the market, expand game better than anyone since the Oil Barrons of the turn of the 20th Century.

They open up rare earth mines, under sell the materials to make non 3rd world mines unprofitable so they close down. Then once those mines are safely closed down and out of the picture, they raise pricing because of 'Demand'.

They're doing this in every major industry they're involved in. And we keep blithely letting them.

[Maxus]

They're doing this in every major industry they're involved in. And we keep blithely letting them.

Sort of. President Obama called them out the other day (well, as close as he gets to calling someone out) and told them, pretty much onbehalf of Planet Earth, to obey the freakin' financial rules and laws, grow up and play nice.

The Chinese response was "We didn't help make those rules, so we're not gonna listen! You're not the boss of me!" and the more diplomatic answer was something like, "How can we obey rules and laws we do not fully understand since we weren't involved in writing them."

[Neeeek]

Remember Solyndra crashed and burned not because it was possible, but because China is funding theirs better than we were (because we were basically fethering the pockets of the corporate executives as opposed to deliberately undercutting the cost of the panels). Even then, the technology is currently borderline at best.

I'm not sure China gives a crap about foreign markets for solar technology. Their goal is to cover the Gobi Desert with panels and power everything they have, since it is one of the top 3 places in the world for solar collection. Which they will accomplish within 10 years, I'm fairly sure.

[sabs]

They could also just cover the gobi desert with Nuclear Plants and Nuclear Waste Disposal sites.
I mean, fuck, who would care.

[Neeeek]

They could also just cover the gobi desert with Nuclear Plants and Nuclear Waste Disposal sites.
I mean, fuck, who would care.

They could. It just happens to not be what they are doing.

[CatharzGodfoot]

They could also just cover the gobi desert with Nuclear Plants and Nuclear Waste Disposal sites.
I mean, fuck, who would care.

There's not enough nuclear fuel in the world to support that.

[erik]

Or are you going to tell me this a government funded message board since I pay for it and I'm a government employee?

Ah, my tax dollars at work! It's always nice when your government pays for things you like.

[Zinegata]

Frank, I'm pretty sure that the $200B+ deficit quoted in the second link is the total accumulated deficit. Which can get pretty big, as California also has at least $260B total debt:

Debt and Deficit are not the same thing. Like, at all.

Yes, I am aware of this. I'm saying your source goofed off and got the two mixed up.

The sites I linked state clearly Texas deficit is not $200B+. It's their Debt which is that level.

Your own link says in the summary that the shortfall/deficit is only at $27B at worst (Deficit = Revenue - Spending), which also more or less jives with the figures I linked. For reference:

Over the next two years, the state faces a budget shortfall of between $15 billion and $27 billion over the next two years, depending on who is doing the calculation

Where you're getting this $200B+ deficit figure from is the table below the summary. However, I'm quite convinced that the "deficit" label in the table is a typo that's supposed to say "debt" instead.

Note that the table's main purpose is to break down how much Texas is spending in different areas (i.e. Education), but suddenly adds a huge $255B sum at the end of it without specifying what it's for. It only calls it "deficit", but it seriously doesn't add up when it also says in the same row that "Total Spending" is at $153B. How can you have a deficit higher than your spending?

Given that the figure is very close to the published debt figure in other sites, I strongly suspect that the article meant to say "Debt" where it marked "deficit" in the table. Otherwise, the Federal government is hugely incompetent for letting Texas spend $255B in unspecified items that are not in its official budget.

Note also that you linked a wiki page edittable by anyone, which makes the possibility of a gaffe likely. And so far, this is the ONLY source I've seen that says Texas' spending is almost on the same level as California at $335B. Everyone else quotes the figure your article says:

The Texas State Legislature passed and Gov. Rick Perry signed on June 19, 2009 a $182 billion 2-year budget (Sept.1, 2009 to Aug. 31, 2011) with a projected $9 billion Rainy Day Fund.

Which again makes a $255B deficit impossible, even with zero revenues. At worst it'd be a $191B, and in reality (with all the collected revenues), it's at $27B deficit over two years at worst.

[Zinegata]

That's not exactly true. I'm pretty sure we can get the right technology within a decade. There are new super black materials on the pipeline and the price barrier is sure to drop down significantly within five years.

Night still frowns upon your plans for Solar power .

But yeah, use of domestic solar power will hopefully become more available. But for simple, honest-to-goodness power, you need nuclear - and raw power is needed for stuff like space propulsion.

[Username17]

$15-27 Billion is what you get when you're talking just the "state" expenditures minus the "state" taxes and the federal transfers to the "state". But I'm talking about the combined state & local deficit, which since we are talking about Education (which in Texas is officially handled by a bizarre and recursive payment loop between local and state coffers) is the number that actually matters. Texas operates a very decentralized government, where money piles are distributed and hidden all over the state. Most of the state's public debt is nominally held by various local agencies within it.

But yeah, that really is 255 billion dollars short for this year before the federal transfers.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

$15-27 Billion is what you get when you're talking just the "state" expenditures minus the "state" taxes and the federal transfers to the "state". But I'm talking about the combined state & local deficit, which since we are talking about Education (which in Texas is officially handled by a bizarre and recursive payment loop between local and state coffers) is the number that actually matters. Texas operates a very decentralized government, where money piles are distributed and hidden all over the state. Most of the state's public debt is nominally held by various local agencies within it.

But yeah, that really is 255 billion dollars short for this year before the federal transfers.

-Username17

Again, your article seems to have messed up, because it's literally the only source that says that total Texas spending (state AND local) is at $335B.

The source I linked says it's $182B annually for BOTH state AND local spending. Again:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/sta ... population

There is probably some overlap between the state and local spending in the tables in your article... OR it should be divided by two because they may be talking about a two-year period. The article you linked keeps talking in terms of two years.

And for reference, again the annual revenue of Texas is $152B.

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/comp ... e_2011bF0a

So at worst the deficit is in the tens of billions; not hundreds of billions.

Also, and I'm repeating myself here: Yes, part of the above revenue is Federal Tax dollars. But the Fed also collected $200B in income taxes directly from Texas citizens - so the money they give Texas is really just money being kicked back by the IRS.

Finally... I will also note that $200B+ in debt is still no laughing matter, as it's a debt about as big as California's, despite the latter having higher revenues.

[DSMatticus]

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/sta ... population

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/sta ... g_2011TXbn
It's 201 billion there, which makes me curious. As a matter of fact, if you click the "more" next to Texas, it takes you to a page that tells you it's 201 billion.

Now, I'm a little confused by a lot of these numbers, but:
1) Texas total state and local spending appears to be 201 billion.
2) Texas total state and local revenue appears to be 160 billion.
3) Texas federal spending appears to be 227 billion.
4) Texas federal revenue appears to be 189 billion.
(All from the websites zinegata's been linking.)

Unless I'm confused by what those numbers actually represent, doesn't this mean Texas is coming up short 79 billion dollars? Or does federal spending in this case mean something other than "Texas's expenditures of federal money/expenditures of federal money on Texas?"

[Username17]

The government in general and Texas in particular are set up to make the accounting as complicated and hard to follow as possible. There are dollars that are literally paid in taxes by Texans to the federal government, then given back to the state of Texas as a transfer, then given to a local government as a transfer, and then used to pay the "local share" of a state agency. That dollar then shows up in federal revenue, federal spending, Texas state revenue, local revenue, Texas state spending twice, and local spending. But it's still actually just one dollar.

Texas state law actually has a restriction on how much total debt "the state" can acquire, and their response to this has been to create wholly owned subsidiaries of the State of Texas that exist primarily to spend money the state doesn't have and take out loans to do it. The state finances of Texas are in a shambles and the debt pile has been growing by tens of billions of dollars a year for a decade. It was growing beyond control or reason before the recession started.

The bottom line, the one even under the part where Texas is "super fucked" unless they reorganize their tax structure, is that Federal Spending in Texas is much much larger than combined State and Local Revenue. So if the state of Texas claims that they aren't relying on federal funds for X, where X is anything at all, then they are basically lying. That the State of Texas has found it especially politically poignant to move shells around so that it looks like the federal government isn't paying for local schools is interesting primarily for what it says about the priorities of Texan voters. It's not actually "true" in any meaningful sense.

So I'm going to have to call bullshit on fbmf's original claim as regards how Texan schools are funded. They are funded primarily with federal money. Much of that money is laundered through state or local coffers before it gets there, but it's still federal money.

-Username17

[fbmf]

If Texas is receiving most of its money from the feds, then that means most of the things the state of texas pays for is paid by the feds.

If you give your niece 50 dollar so she has enough money to buy a game that costs 80 dollars, do you think she's correct and honest when she claims that you did not pay partially for the game?

If I (The feds) gave a hooker (State of Texas) $50.00 which she put into her account today and a month from now that same hooker gave her daughter (Texas Education Agency) an $80.00 video game, I wouldn't think to myself "I bought a hooker's daughter 5/8 of a video game."

I still don't have an answer for my question:

Are you suggesting this a government subsidized message board? I pay for it and I am a government employee. Better yet, since I am a teacher, is it owned jointly by the feds, state, and district?

Game On,
fbmf

[DSMatticus]

Government subsidized doesn't mean "the money came from the government at some point," since if that were the case, the U.S. prints every dollar in existence and everything would be government subsidized. A subsidy is "the government gives money to X for them to spend it on Y in Z ways." Your paycheck, for comparison, is "the government gives money to X in exchange for services Y."

Now whether or not we want to call the money Texas receives from the federal government subsidies for things is kind of irrelevant. The actual question is that Texas spends some amount of money on things it does at the state and local level, and Texas receives some amount of money from state and local revenue and also some amount from the federal government, so what does Texas's spending situation look like without that federal money?

Consider this purely hypothetical set of numbers:
Texas spends 100 billion total.
Texas spends 10 billion of that on education.
Texas collects in total revenue 10 billion.
Texas receives 90 billion from the federal government.

Now, in this situation it would be easy for the Texas state government to say, "we don't need the federal government's assistance for education: we pay for all 10 billion of it using our own revenue." But that would be a dirty, dirty lie of omission because if Texas weren't receiving that 90 billion from the federal government, they wouldn't be able to dedicate all 10 billion of their state revenue to education. They would have to stretch that 10 billion to cover all the other expenses the state has to pay.

But it's even more misleading than this, because Texas has a lot of independent agencies that it writes checks to using federal money, and then those agencies write checks back to Texas, and when Texas gets the money back they pretend it wasn't federal money anymore. So Texas takes that 90 billion they receive from the federal government and pretend large quantities of it are actually from the state.

So, yes, if you really want to, you can say "federal spending on education in Texas is really low" and be technically right, but that's really deceptive and misleading because in doing so, Texas is just laundering its federal money around to other places so it can boast "we do education solo." If you live with your parents, you don't get to boast about how you went out and bought a brand new luxury car in cash. It may be true, but you wouldn't have been able to do it if someone else weren't paying for rent.

[Zinegata]

Unless I'm confused by what those numbers actually represent, doesn't this mean Texas is coming up short 79 billion dollars?

Uh, no. Frank and you are getting that part wrong, but admittedly it IS a confusing site (apparently, it's not just Texas who has fucked up finances).

The Federal spending tab in the link shows you the amount of money spent by the Federal government in the state of Texas for its own projects - i.e. military bases like Fort Hood.

Essentially, it's like this...

The Federal revenue of $189B is the amount collected by the IRS from Texas citizens.

Local & State Revenue is the total of the local/state taxes (which never goes through the IRS) and some of the IRS money that is kicked back to Texas. This is the money that the local & state government can use to spend for its projects.

Local & State spending is the amount the state/local government plans to spend. You subtract this amount from state/local revenue to get your deficit. I'm not sure why they have a different amount again though when they had $150B in the table; but I think it's because the link you showed includes pensions and other "liabilities"- which are not necessarily spending but stuff that Texas has to pay out from various pre-existing funds.

Federal spending is the amount the Federal government is spending on Federal facilities like Fort Hood that just happen to sit on Texas. This spending actually gets added up to the national spending total, which is then subtracted from the national IRS revenues to get the total Federal deficit.

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Now, this again doesn't show that the Texas state/local government has a huge deficit, but they have accumulated a huge debt and it's getting worse - meaning they've been running a deficit for years. If you check the other states, few have a debt as big as Texas', especially in comparison to revenue.

Also, the Federal spending in Texas doesn't mean that Perry is spending $227B on top of his alloted budget. What it does mean is that the Fed is pumping another $227B into the Texan economy because they're paying for stuff like Fort Hood which are Federal facilities. That's the bigger red flag to be honest - the Fed is spending more than the local/state government on Texas!

Strictly speaking, shutting down Federal facilities isn't under the control of the state government anyway so you can't really pin it on the state/local government. Blame the folks in Washington instead for spending a lot on stuff like Fort Hood.

However, having pretty high Federal spending would also help account for the Texas "miracle". Stuff like Fort Hood employs a lot of people.


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tl;dr: In short, there are two deficits: One incurred by the state/local government (which is guessimated at $27B), and another deficit at the Federal level (because they spend more on Texas than they collect from it).

[Zinegata]

Oh, and one last thing:

Education spending is generally under state/local. Federal spending generally covers stuff like Fort Hood or NASA facilities in Houston.

That would again easily account for fbmf's claim that Texan education spending is funded primarily from Texan dollars.

Finally, I don't think you can really "launder" Federal money via local governments and turn money meant for NASA into paying for teacher's salaries. You can claim that the Federal spending eventually goes to the people of Texas, which then pays part of it to the Texan state/local government, which it then spends on education. Pretty convoluted trail if you ask me.

[DSMatticus]

I thought that might be the case. So Texas is only 41 billion short when you compare state/local spending and state/local revenue (using the numbers once you click 'more,' using the numbers listed on the chart it's ~29 billion short; I have no idea why the numbers are different).

Is there anything on that site that corresponds to the amount of money Texas receives from the federal government to spend locally? I wonder if that's a category under federal spending?

For example: see http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed ... s=b&rank=p

There is "direct payments," "grants." Are those direct payments to the State of Texas? Grants for Texas institutions? Is there an f'ing glossary of terms for this website? That would be super helpful.

[Zinegata]

I thought that might be the case. So Texas is only 41 billion short when you compare state/local spending and state/local revenue (using the numbers once you click 'more,' using the numbers listed on the chart it's ~29 billion short; I have no idea why the numbers are different).

Is there anything on that site that corresponds to the amount of money Texas receives from the federal government to spend locally? I wonder if that's a category under federal spending?

For example: see http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed ... s=b&rank=p

There is "direct payments," "grants." Are those direct payments to the State of Texas? Grants for Texas institutions? Is there an f'ing glossary of terms for this website? That would be super helpful.

I don't think so. It's a convoluted mess .

Direct payments however is a percentage of the money the IRS collected, which it kicks back to the state/local government. I'm pretty sure that there's an overlap between the state/local and federal IRS revenue, which means that the total combined deficit (state/local/federal revenue - state/local/federal spending) is a bit bigger... but again the state can only control the spending on their side.

[tzor]

Night still frowns upon your plans for Solar power .

But yeah, use of domestic solar power will hopefully become more available. But for simple, honest-to-goodness power, you need nuclear - and raw power is needed for stuff like space propulsion.

We use coal for nighttime and laugh at everyone who thinks their electric cars are green. (Because they charge during the night.)

We won't have the next generation nuclear plants online for another decade (or two). Happy times they will be. I can't wait for the tree huggers to panic over that one.

[fbmf]

If you live with your parents, you don't get to boast about how you went out and bought a brand new luxury car in cash. It may be true, but you wouldn't have been able to do it if someone else weren't paying for rent.

I guess that the difference: I'm okay with people bragging about not having a car payment even if they live with their parents. They did pay for the car with their own money. The car is in their name. They own it.

Game On,
fbmf