In a conversation a couple of days ago, I was remarking on how great it was that Texas used a radical method of budgeting wherein they find out how much money they have and then decide how to spend it. The person with whom I was speaking countered that Texas relied on federal stimulus funding to balance its budget.
I wasn’t quite sure what was supposed to be wrong with that. The deficit that Texas faced was small enough that the stimulus funding covered nearly all of it. Somehow that’s supposed to be bad?
I should have realized that he was parroting a meme: “Texas is a welfare queen”. (ASIDE: This is the same delightful publication that printed photographs and addresses of homes with McCain/Palin signs.)
Moreover, the meme is even more bogus that it first appears: Texas received less stimulus funding than almost any state. (Only Virginia and Nebraska received less, per capita.) And, even refusing the stimulus funding entirely wouldn’t save the taxpayer any money; it would just get reallocated to another state.
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