Governor Rick Perry: Egg Meet Face

How is it, I must ask, that Rick Perry is going to come out of this whole unemployment stimulus rejection thing, coupled, obviously with his recent assault on voters’ rights, smelling like anything else but a stink bug?

In his statement last March when he refused to accept $550 million in federal stimulus money, funds specifically set aside to enable Texas to help its growing list of unemployed workers, Perry was his typical Texas chauvinist self. From KTVT in a story posted last March 13th:

“If Texas were to accept these funds from Obama, my view is that it would make Texas less competitive than the other states, and it would hurt the prosperity and employment prospects for the citizens of the state of Texas”

Well the State Senate voted to accept the funds, but the bill was stalled in the House because, you know, the Republican love affair with the Voter ID bill that sought to disenfranchise the poor and the elderly.

So any hopes that Perry had that he ultimately would gain these funds anyway, without looking like he was giving in to a proffered Democratic handout were dashed.

And now, because Texas’ “prosperity and employment prospects” failed to materialize in the ensuing months, with Texas jobless ranks swelling from 139,592 to 353,881 within a single year – that’s nearly 600 jobless claims filed per day – Perry now finds that the state’s unemployment coffers are nearly empty.

So yesterday Perry announced that Texas was going to borrow $160 million in a federal - that is, Yankee -interest free loan so the state could continue to provide unemployment checks. And the word is that this borrow and spend behavior is likely to persist for awhile, and Perry could end up asking for as much as $493 million between now and October.

Nice job, Perry.

And how, pray tell, are we to pay the feds back? Well, according to The Chron They are going to issue $2 billion in state bonds. From the Chron:

“The state ultimately is expected to have to take out up to $2 billion in bonds to repay the federal loans and spread the burden of higher taxes on businesses out for four or five years.”

And how much will these bonds cost Texas in interest payments it will make on these bonds? State Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin claims it is going to cost Texas an additional $100 million in interest.

That’s $100 million tacked on to $493 million. $593 million total cost to Texas. In short, it is going to cost Texas nearly $600 million to take care of its unemployed this year.

So instead of getting $550 million in a federal bailout, the state will instead spend $600 million in money it doesn’t have.

In short, Rick Perry and his Texas chauvinism cost Texas over a billion dollars.

I wonder what his teabagging base will have to say about that?