Fiscal Security Texas Style

I just took a great class at my church called “Financial Peace University”.  It is supposed to help you get your fiscal life together.  One of the first things you are supposed to do is make a budget for yourself.  I thought it would be a great idea to just go copy the experts in making budgets and save myself a lot of time.  But then I had to find out who the experts at making budgets are?  The Texas Legislature of course!! They have been making budgets balance on a large scale for years and years.  Wow, now I nearly have this thing licked.

The next step in the process would be to do a little research.  How do these guys at the legislature get together and get these massive budgets to balance?  The Dallas Morning News has always been a good place for me to do a little research on recent events.  I put in a couple searches on this last session’s budget process and found this article, “We have a Budget, but not a prayer”.  According to House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, this is a budget that "is disciplined, fiscally conservative and that lives within our means."  This is just what I am looking for in my own life.  But wait, according to this article even after making cuts to the number of teachers, police pay and a lot of other areas, costs are still $99 Billion and revenues are $80.6 Billion.  According to my class, the amount of money going into my budget has to be at least as much as the amount going out.

I thought that maybe I didn’t understand the article well enough.  So, I went to another source and found this article in The Texas Observer: “The Next Budget Crisis”.   This article has a little more meat to it.  It explains the basic concept the Republicans used when making their budget.  The budget is largely based on two premises.  The first is that the economy will recover soon and bring in more tax revenue.  The second is that the federal government is sending funds to bail out healthcare.

So, if I try to apply what the legislature did to the state budget to my own budget it would look a little like this.  I put myself down for a big pay raise for the next couple years, not because I have a record of getting big raises, but more because I really need them to make my budget balance.  Then I go in and reduce my payments to my water, sewer, cable and electric.  I thought one of them is bound to go down over the next two years, so I am going to come out a winner there.  Now, I have a balanced budget the same way the experts did it.

I took my new budget to my wife who is much better at this type of thing than I am.  After looking it over for a few minutes, she took my wallet away, changed the password on all our accounts and handed me $20.  She told me to come back when that was gone and stop looking at the budget.  Maybe we should do the same thing to our representatives.