Rick Perry’s Week In Wonderland

It’s been quite a week for Texas Governor Rick Perry. And the State of the State Address isn’t even until Tuesday.

Air quality…HPV vaccines…money for education…all things that Rick Perry was in the news for this week. And all, on the surface, sound like great, progressive, (even Democratic!) ideas.

Is Governor 39 Percent finally trying to govern from the center? Don’t bet on it. A close look at several of Perry’s plans as floated this week shows he talks a good game but doesn’t have the plays to back it up.

Let’s look first at Governor Perry’s $183 million proposal to improve air quality. First off, it’s a fairly limited proposal. Consider this:

If approved by the Legislature, the money will represent a 71 percent increase over the most recent biennium amount for the Texas Emission Reduction Plan, which provides grants to help businesses retrofit diesel engines and make other emission reductions. Funding would increase from $257 million to $440 million.

Note, though, that the ERIG, which is the primary component of the thing Perry is talking about, is very selective:

The TCEQ’s Emissions Reduction Incentive Grants (ERIG) Program provides grants to eligible projects in nonattainment areas and affected counties. The grants offset the incremental costs associated with reducing emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) from high-emitting internal combustion engines.

Perry’s proposal won’t have nearly the long-range or sweeping effects of other plans presently before the Lege.

State Rep. Ana Hernandez’s (D-Magnolia) HB 440 would put some tough teeth in the Texas Clean Air Act. As opposed to just throwing money at a problem, her legislation actually does something to prevent pollution on a wider scale. From within Perry’s own party, State Rep. Doc Anderson (R-Waco) has filed legislation to put a 180-day moratorium on coal power plant construction. This would allow time for litigation to make its way through trial courts and even allow the TCEQ to do more study of the proplematic coal plant plan Perry has endorsed through the controversial fast-tracking initiative he instituted.

Aside from his environmental “plan” consider Perry’s higher education “plan.” It sounds impressive because it appears to funnel billions of new dollars into higher education.

However, no plan Rick Perry can propose will truly be useful to higher education until a couple of things are addressed.

First, tuition re-regulation. Tuition de-regulation, like electric de-regulation, was an unmitigated disaster. Until Rick Perry utters the words “re-regulate college tuition” he can cram money into anything he wonts and—bottom line—it won’t matter. Why? Because the plan does nothing to get more students in colleges and university.

In addition to tuition re-regulation, Perry needs to funnel more money into college prepatory programs in inner-cities and rural areas. Without making sure that the best and brightest can afford to attend the universities and colleges and participate in the programs he seeks to fund, he might as well have that $1.83 billion withdrawn from the state treasury, cashed in as $1 dollar bills, and stacked up for the 2007 Aggie Bonfire.

Until massive reforms are undertaken in this state to reform financing and tuition for higher education, Perry can hang up being considered higher ed’s saviour.

Perry’s education plan is already being criticized. One criticism is that it will leave border universities behind.

Of course, no Week In Wonderland would be complete without talk of something being privatized.  All we can do in this case is thank God it wasn’t a social service. This time, it is the Texas Lottery. (Well, ’selling’ as opposed to simply privatizing).
Though the lottery is really just a drop in the bucket when it comes to education funding (in spite of the thousands the Lottery spends publicizing how much it has put in the ed coffers), privatization isn’t the answer to the lottery woes the state has seen of late.

The revolving door on lottery administration could easily be solved with better oversight and a higher quality of appointments. Selling the lottery is no answer.

Finally, there is the issue of the HPV vaccine. This one is particularly interesting because it was proposed in the Legislature by two Democrats and because it is, more so than any of his other “week In Wonderland” ideas, highly controversial to those in his own party.

For someone who has governed from the far-right for the last half-decade plus, I am sure it pains him that the John Birch Society panned his nifty little idea:

In issuing his executive order, Governor Perry has arrogantly defied the objections not only of more family-oriented members of the Texas state legislature, but the rights of parents who believe that they know best about medical decisions — and lifestyle decisions — for their children. His order will mean that, starting in September 2008, girls entering the sixth grade – who are usually 11 and 12 years of age – will be required to receive a drug called Gardasil, a new vaccine that protects against four strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV. There are 100 different strains of HPV and 30 of them are transmitted sexually and affect the human genitals.

While I support the idea of HPV vaccines, I don’t support the manner in which Perry mandated their use.

For one thing, he unceremoniously stole the idea from Democrats. Second, his ursupal of the Legislature means that the shots are mandated before the Lege was able to take any action to modify insurance policy requirements to make sure funding for the procedure can’t be denied or set up any kind of mechanism to fund them for kids who are unable to afford them.

While a lot of Perry’s criticism will come from the far-right crowd that thinks the vaccines will encourage fifth graders to have sex, some of it will, of course, come from the anti-vaccine crowd as well. That’s not too big of a deal since that crowd doesn’t even like the fact that children are required to get a polio vaccine.

At any rate, that Perry sucked up Democrats legislative proposals rather uncerimoniously and also put the cart before the horse on this issue in terms of insurance and funding.

So, Perry’s week in Wonderland wasn’t terribly productive. Perhaps next time he decides to address such weighty issues, he’ll do so from a more reality-based perspective.