Texas Voters Say Yes to Bonds and Props

Well, all 16 Texas Constitution props passed, including 5 bond propositions - money for student loans, jails, roads, colonias water systems and cancer research. It is an interesting election cycle when supposedly liberal New Jersey defeats a stem cell reasearch initiative, but Texas passes a cancer research initiative by over 60%. Elsewhere in the country taxpayers struck down spending, but here the wallets were open. The lowest-passing propositions however was the cancer research proposition.

Maybe it's the fact that stem cell was taken off the table, and Republicans like Gov Perry rushed to support something that was bipartisan feel-goodism. There was a last-minute concerns from some on the right that this might be a backdoor plot for embryonic stem cell research. I doubt that was the intention, and a late Texas Alliance for Life email broadcast that TAL had no position on prop 15 and that it also could herald funding in Texas for ethical non-embryonic stem cell research, such as adult stem cell research. This is far different from embyonic stem cell research that includes therapeutic cloning (which kills embryonic humans to harvest stem cells). So in fact, another way to look at it is this: Republican leaders jumped on the bandwagon to show a pro-research political position that didn't violate pro-life ethical judgments.

We at Travis Monitor might have agreed on the logic, but we did the math and found Proposition 15 and the other bond proposals wanting on the fiscal responsibility score. A simple fact that calls all the bonds into question: The legislature had an $8 billion surplus in January but decided to go the bond route for items that should have been dealt with out of general revenues and ongoing expenses. Why use debt when you can pay cash? On prop 12, they have a crisis in road funding papered over with an inappropriate grab of general bond debt, while the gas tax diversion continues. On prop 16, it was a 'good money after bad' situation.

One ironic reason that Prop 15 was not fiscally sound is that medical research is so popular politically that it gets huge funding already at the Federal level - $30 billion for the NIH and over $5 billion for cancer research (NCI) alone. The cancer research need is more than met already at the Federal level.

We do hope some good will come out of this expenditure of our Texas taxpayer dollars, which requires oversight and accountability. To ensure that the $3 billion Prop 15 pot of money goes to top-notch medical research in Texas and not for corruption, cornyism or mediocrity, there will have to be rigorous oversight on this. Hoping to get rigorous oversight out of the Texas lege though is a bit like hoping an Aggie can cure cancer (Sorry Aggies, I couldn't resist.) Hope springs eternal.