Issue Position: Cut Taxes and Spending

Issue Position

Taxes are too high. That's because government spending is too high. I want to reduce both.

Today our state government spends money on almost everything: education, health care, cancer research, business incentives (i.e. corporate welfare), and poverty programs. These may be worthy goals, but they are not proper functions of government.

Steps I would take:

*I would vote to repeal the business margins tax that was proposed and signed in 2006 by Republican Governor Rick Perry, and filed by Rep. Jim Keffer (Republican from Eastland).

*I would file a bill to cut the state sales tax from 6.25% to 4%.

Those two tax reductions would reduce state revenue by about $25 billion over the next two years*. I propose cutting expenditures to match. (The current total budget is about $172 billion.) I support across-the-board cuts, and I note that most of the cuts will need to come from the two largest areas of state spending: education and health and human services.

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