Health care

The formula here is just as it was at the beginning of the session: Failure to get results on school finance and property cuts would be horrible news for Rick Perry, less troubling for David Dewhurst and Tom Craddick, and of very little political consequence to the average member of the Texas Legislature.

It takes two to tango and two to tax, and the Senate isn’t dancing with the House on revenue for school finance. Their bottom line numbers are similar. Both houses started with the idea of lowering local school property taxes by 50 cents, and that sets the size of the project. But their methods of getting to the bottom line are as different as Mars and Venus.

It’s usually best to take your medicine fast, in one ugly gulp, like mom used to say. But House leaders, apparently confident they can pass a major tax bill and an ambitious rewriting of the state’s school finance system, decided to let both measures sit unprotected over a long weekend.

Mention March 2006 to political people in Texas, and you’ll trigger a conversation about the top of the ballot. But March 2006 — the month of the primaries and, in particular, the Republican primaries — is on the minds of a fair number of legislators who want to remain in office after this term.

Can you remember a particular State of the State speech? That’s not meant as a slap at Gov. Rick Perry — we’re just noting the historical significance of the form. What’s useful about these spiels is that they tell you what direction a governor hopes a Legislature will take. It’s where Perry said he wanted a reexamination of some death penalty issues four years ago, for instance. This year, his list was devoid of surprises, but gave listeners a sense of his direction. Some highlights:

Two weeks ago, the smart guys were betting there’d be $1 billion to $2 billion in red ink in the state’s starting budget. Instead, it’s in the black, though it will probably swing from one inkwell to the other in the next few weeks.

Piece number one fell into place Monday, when Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn announced the state’s financial fortunes have improved over two years ago and the ugly budget fight that ensued then might be avoided this time around. Budgeteers, nervous about Strayhorn’s steady political attacks on Gov. Rick Perry, were braced for worse news. Instead, her numbers were within a hair’s breadth of their own predictions about state income.

State District Judge John Dietz, ruling on the heels of closing arguments, said the state’s system of funding public schools is unconstitutional and ordered the Legislature to fix it within a year. His detailed ruling won’t be out for a couple of weeks, but if you do a quick calculation of what he said so far, it’s easy to argue that the state will have to spend another $3 billion or so each year on public education. That’s in addition to any money that would be used lowering local property taxes. (Click here for a copy of Dietz’s bench ruling.)

Political journalists are often called fight promoters — people who’ll try to start a contest where there isn’t one — but the state’s senior senator and the governor are making the job easy. They’re even giving us facts to play with, and starting the fights without much prompting from the likes of us.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census prefaced the Republican Party’s national convention with a bummer of a report that says, among other things, that Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured people of any state and that the median income here dropped during the first years of this decade.