My moms family are texans.. I’d live to be one.. There’s just not enough snow there.
To Danny in TN: il and gas once fueled much of the Texas budget. Yet in 2011, it only account for only 6.6% of the state’s tax revenue!
Thirty years ago, the production taxes paid by oil and gas operators amounted to about 24 percent of state tax collections.
A price crash in the early 1980s sent Texas into a deep recession and a downward fiscal spiral that forced state lawmakers in 1987 to enact sizable budget cuts and tax increases.
That same year, they also proposed creating an Economic Stabilization Fund — and voters later authorized it — to be filled mostly by excess oil and gas production taxes.
The original intent of that rainy day fund was to smooth out the effects of big fluctuations in the economy by socking away money from when times were good to spend when times were tough.
The reliance on oil and gas taxes for state operations has since diminished in large part because the economy is less tied to the industry.
Setting aside tax dollars in the rainy day fund also helped to wean the state off that money for ongoing expenses. Last year, those taxes accounted for just 6.6 percent of the $39 billion in tax collections.