White Derides “Part-Time Perry”

It has been somewhat of a mantra this year that Texas Governor Rick Perry doesn’t earn his keep. In fact, for that big paycheck he receives every year, Rick Perry is said to be working between a seventh and an eighth of the time that your average full-time employed person works.

Bill White says that Rick Perry works 7-hour weeks.

Now on the face of it, that sounds really bad and that Texans aren’t getting their money’s worth and it seemed like the White campaign was striking a chord among hard-working Texans from Beaumont to El Paso.

Indeed, Katy Bacon, a Bill White campaign spokesperson said this about Perry’s lazy work habits:

“We aren't getting our money's worth from Part-Time Perry, who's charging taxpayers $428.57 an hour for work and nearly $10,000 a month for an extravagant rental mansion. Meanwhile, under Perry, the state faces an $18 billion budget hole as state spending has nearly doubled and state debt has doubled.”

Then I saw this video where Perry made his defense, one uploaded to You Tube by the Texas Tribune.

The first half of the video, as you could see, was Bill White making his case, and the second half was Rick Perry saying that just because it’s not down on his schedule doesn’t mean that he isn’t hard at work.

This started me thinking.

I started wondering if Rick Perry not working on the looming $18 billion budget deficit was necessarily a bad thing. He is sure to botch it up and make things worse, not better for Texans. Rick Perry’s fingerprints are all over the budget shortfall. He and his policies actually caused it. Do you think that he will be able to fix that which originated on his watch?

So in a way, having a part-time governor, if it is Rick Perry we are talking about, isn’t such a terrible thing. Perry is actually doing Texas a favor by not doing so much.

OK, yes we are losing $428.57 for each and every hour that Rick Perry doesn’t do anything, but considering the nature of what he could be doing, paying him not to do that is pretty much a no-brainer bargain.