When in doubt, sell the Texas Lottery. That’s Gov. Rick Perry‘s solution for funding education and health care – two areas that always get short-changed at budget time. Perry laid out his fat and lofty agenda Tuesday in his State of the State address. The high point, if you can call it that, was Perry’s idea of selling the lottery, because, as he explained it, the funding source won’t “dry up over time or cost the state general revenue, unlike a bond proposal.” The governor believes the sale would fetch $14 billion. He proposes using the money to create three trust funds – $2.7 billion would go toward health coverage for the uninsured, which in turn would generate interest payments of up to a quarter billion dollars per year; $3 billion would fund a cancer-research initiative (originally proposed as a bond election); and $8 billion would go to a public-education endowment that would provide $800 million a year for schools. Reactions from legislators so far? Mixed.
This article appears in February 2 • 2007.
