To be fair, Texas's budgeting processes are pretty weird, so let me review some basics.

The Texas constitution limits spending in four ways. The most significant restriction is the state’s pay-as-you-go provision. Under this provision, which was added to the state constitution in 1942, the Legislature can’t appropriate more money than the comptroller says will be available. There is an exception for emergencies, but even then, you need a four-fifths vote in both houses of the Lege. If you want to check, it’s Article III, Section 49a.

The second biggest restriction is that Texas has a spending cap, added to the constitution in 1978: “In no biennium shall the rate of growth of appropriations from state tax revenues not dedicated by this constitution exceed the estimated rate of growth of the state's economy.” That’s in Article VIII, Section 22.  

(The latter two restrictions are rarely mentioned, because Texas isn’t really at risk of running afoul of either one, but in case you're curious: the constitution stipulates that if annual debt service exceeds 5% of the state’s average general revenue fund spending, the state can’t issue any more debt. And finally, the constitution includes a restriction against welfare spending: no more than 1% of the state’s biennial budget can be appropriated for TANF.)

In addition to all of these spending restrictions, Texas has a variety of barriers to raising taxes. Some of these are in the constitution, and some are just political. The result is that Texas doesn't raise much money, in per capita terms. And that, in turn, serves to reinforce the spending restrictions: The pay-as-you-go provision effectively ensures that regardless of what legislators want to do, they can't really go crazy. And the spending cap means that even if the state has an unusually flush year, they're constrained by the norms of the previous session. 

It is probably fair to say that the state tends to spend about as much as it can, but that's because "as much as it can" is bound to be "not that much." And Texans are generally fine with this. Evidence: They keep voting for fiscal conservatives, and have done for most of the state’s history (regardless of whether those conservatives were typed as Ds or Rs). Further evidence: the voters are, in fact, the people who keep authorizing these spending restrictions on themselves via constitutional amendments. 

In other words, although the budget currently awaiting Governor Perry’s signature  looks dramatically bigger than the previous one, it doesn't mean that Texas has abruptly abandoned its longstanding tradition of fiscal responsibility. If anything the opposite is true. (Side note: the Journal is talking about the state's general funds budget, not the all funds budget, so that's what I'm talking about here too.) 

So now let’s talk about what’s been going on in Texas over the past couple of budget cycles. As you have no doubt heard, the state of Texas has been doing so well, in recent years, that politicians and pundits have started referring to it as the “Texas Miracle.”

Despite that, when the state legislature convened in 2011 (our part-time Lege meets every other year for 140 days) lawmakers found that they were facing a severe budget shortfall. The estimates of its size vary, because they're based on projections about population growth, school enrollment, and so on. But the summary explanation is that the shortfall was the result of tough economic conditions, exacerbated by severely bad projections on the part of the state’s comptroller, Susan Combs.

That is, although Texas’s economy was doing better than most, the country had been dealing with the worst national downturn since the Great Depression. No state, including Texas, escaped unscathed. Let’s look again at the 2014-2015 Biennial Revenue Estimate--these are in Table 1 (p. 4) of the attached PDF. Between FY2008 and FY2009, gross state product actually declined. So did net personal income and total employment. The state’s population, however, continued to grow; Texas added nearly half a million people over the course of that year, and so the unemployment rate ticked up.

By FY2010, the state was in recovery. So why was there a shortfall in 2011? 

First of all, as Combs put it in her 2012-2013 Biennial Revenue Estimate, tax revenues during the then-current (2010-2011) biennium had been worse than expected, so the Lege was going to have to use about $4 billion to patch up the current budget. Beyond that, she was fairly pessimistic about what collections would look like for 2012-2013. 

Accordingly, Combs estimated that the state would have $72.2 billion available for general-purpose spending. By May, she revised the figure upward, but only to $73.4 billion.

Even at the time, many people--legislators, analysts, etc--thought the estimate was too low. Now we know that it was: when the current BRE was released, in January, the comptroller’s office counted $90.2 billion in general-revenue related funds available for certification.

But that didn't really matter, in 2011, because the Lege can't write a budget based on their expectations. They have to write a budget that fits within the comptroller's estimates. What's going on, in other words, isn't that the current proposal (the $102 billion) is comically bloated. It's that the previous budget, which appropriated $84 billion, was much smaller than it needed to be. 

(As a heuristic, maybe it's worth saying that Texas's annual general spending per capita is less than $4,000 per year, which is one of lowest rates of any state--so although the top-line numbers sound big, keep in mind the scale of the state itself.) 

The problem is that Texas grew between 2009 and 2011, as it had been doing for years and as it continues to do. In 2000, we were about 21 million. In 2010, about 25 million. Today, a little more than 26 million. 

In other words, 2011’s “zero-growth budget” was nothing to brag about. It effectively meant that services were cut across the board (and this is not a state that was being unwarrantedly generous about services in the first place). New investments were basically off the table (and this is a state that, as as result of its tremendous growth, needs new investments in basic things like roads and schools). 

Texas Democrats have subsequently observed that it’s a little suspicious that the state effectively got a mandate to cut the budget at this juncture--with the Tea Party movement at its moment of maximum power, and with Perry about to enter the race for the Republican presidential nomination. I think they’re right to make that critique, and there are certainly Texas Republicans (Combs being chief among them) who deserve to be fired for spending half their time bragging on the Texas Miracle and the other half advising a permanent defensive crouch.

But again, keep in mind that the comptroller’s estimate is an actual restriction, because of the constitutional pay-as-you-go provision. It’s probably fair to say that even if Republicans were sanguine, they didn’t think the sweeping cuts were ideal. The evidence is that, as Parsons indicates, big areas of the budget, like Medicaid and education, were deliberately underfunded. I mean, no one issued a press release announcing that that was the plan, but it was pretty obvious that legislators expected to come back in January 2013 and backfill the budget as needed, which is in fact what they did. 

You could add up all of the spending on other programs mentioned and it would cost less than spending on public schools, which makes up about half of Texas’s spending and which are, as the Journal correctly says, a priority.

Assuming this is true (I wouldn’t be surprised, but haven’t seen the source), I would guess it has something to do with the fact that most states don’t have notable economic growth or a well-stocked reserve fund.

Here’s the kind of rhetoric you hear from those big-spending conservatives who want to draw down the Rainy Day Fund: Although it’s true that interest rates are historically low, making it cheap to borrow, it’s also true that interest rates are historically low, meaning that it doesn’t make much sense to keep billions of dollars in a fund that earns less than 1% interest, especially if the alternative is borrowing at 3%.

This would be a reasonable way of looking at the situation if not for the fact that, as explained at tedious length above, the 2012-13 baseline was artificially ratcheted down by bad budget math.

Nobody in Texas has forgotten that lesson, at all. Through bitter experience we have learned that we can’t just go out back and frack up a few million dollars like our forefathers did. That’s why, for example, the budget on Perry’s desk--the budget that the Wall Street Journal wants him to veto?--expands funding for priorities like higher education. 

Really, the risk of that happening is remote. 

First of all, Denmark is vastly more homogeneous than the United States. In terms of ethnicity, most Danes are not just white but ethnically Danish (PDF). In America, slightly fewer than two-thirds of the people are non-Hispanic whites. Similarly, although Danes may not be as overtly religious as Americans are, 79.1% identify as Lutheran (unsurprising, given that that’s the state religion). As of 2012, 77% of Americans identified as Christian, according to Gallup, which is a much broader category. Denmark also has an official language; the United States doesn't. Overlaying this demographic similarity is, apparently, a high degree of top-line political consensus; Denmark is famously the happiest country in the OECD, and as Daley noted in her article, politicians on both sides are in favor of continuing with the Denmark model. 

Secondly, Denmark is more static than the United States. (I was going to say "consistent" instead of "static", because I thought static sounded pejorative; then I thought, do I only think that because I'm an American and we resist all tranquility?) Its fertility rate, as of 2013, was 1.73, meaning that the average Danish woman has 1.73 children; in the United States, the figure was 2.06. Its population growth, which is a function of the birth rate plus the immigration rate (minus the deaths and emigration numbers), is also lower than that of the United States.

So now let's look at immigration, because that's where the difference between the Danish model and the American model becomes apparent. In the United States, according to the Census bureau, 12.8% of the population is foreign-born. In Denmark, as you would guess, the figure is much lower: 10.1% of the people are immigrants or the recent descendants of immigrants. 

"Immigrants or descendants"--that's the category given in Statistics Denmark. 
In America, of course, that category isn't frequently used (although the Census does collect data on it, and most recently found that 33 million Americans--another 11% of the population--have at least one foreign-born parent). The occasional outbreak of birtherism notwithstanding, having a foreign-born parent is an interesting biographical aside, not a legal complication. That's not necessarily the case in Denmark, which has famously strict immigration laws (even compared to other states in Western Europe). This, then, points to the difference between the Danish model and the United States. It's not that America has more immigration than Denmark; it's that the American system is a more open one. 

The Denmark model is, by contrast, a high-touch approach. If you're a single parent, as in the case Daley described, you get a lot of benefits; if you manage to migrate there, the state will provide a lot of supports. And it's not surprising that the people of Denmark would support the implicit social contract. The country is doing well; they are, for the most part, doing well, and if they weren't, 96% of them told the OECD pollsters that they know someone they could turn to in a time of need. In other words--and with apologies for being reductive about it--it's like they're living in Richard Scarry's Busytown: the country is half the size of Maine, with fewer than six million people, the vast majority of whom share a common ethnicity (Viking) and that character-building official language (Danish).

There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but it's radically different from the United States, which is big, sprawling, heterogeneous, pluralistic and, shall we say, debate-oriented. Under those conditions, a smaller state may be better for both political and pragmatic reasons. First, the smallish state seems to work as a pressure valve for the discontents of diversity--diversity of opinion and culture, to say nothing of race or religion, those old American fault lines. For the most part these debates are civil, but when they fall into us-vs-them narratives--as occasionally happens, even in Denmark--one thing that mitigates some tension is the fact that the stakes are logically smaller when the people being "othered" are perceived to be receiving less. I’ve said before (as have others) that this is one of the reasons Texas has been relatively temperate about unauthorized immigration; we don’t hardly have a safety net, so it’s not like anyone can be accused of taking ruthless advantage of it. 

And then, setting aside the political psychology stuff, a country as big as the United States is bound to be more varied and more variable than a small, compact, centralized one is going to be. This is why, to me, it makes sense for us to have a (relatively) limited federal government, leaving the individual states to overlay the federal apparatus with systems and services according to the needs, abilities, and preferences of voters there. In other words, a state like Massachusetts (which is small, affluent, and educated, and has been that way, more or less stably and predictably, for a long time) might prefer a more "Scandinavian" model; a state like Texas, which is young, growing, mutable, and evolving, might reasonably prefer a lighter hand.  

For more along these lines, see my op-ed from the Dallas Morning News last week. I would also recommend Jonathan Cohn's article from last year, "Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala", which I don't fully agree with but nonetheless found thought-provoking and enjoyable. 

And here's what we find in the story itself:

The subhed is, at the least, a poor summary of both the study and the article. 

Note too that the story doesn't back up Lowrey's claim that Medicaid coverage made recipients "vastly more financially secure", although if you read the study you can figure out why she said that; although recipients spent more on health care once they had Medicaid, their risk of catastrophic financial loss was well mitigated. Jonathan Cohn, at The New Republic, has a good explanation.

The study's results are not surprising for a reader from Texas, a state that has been running what you might call a long-term unofficial experiment in not extending insurance coverage to people. We're notorious for that--Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured residents of any state. 

On the other hand, as I've been saying on Twitter and on this week's mini book tour, Texas is not worst for actual health. If you look at the annual rankings from the United Health Foundation--not an organization that can be said to be biased in the state's favor--Texas ranks 40th overall, in part because of the low insurance rate, but 25th for health outcomes. The Commonwealth Fund, similarly, ranks Texas 46th overall, but 21st for "healthy lives" (although their most recent ranking comes from 2009, so I've been citing the United Health Foundation more often). 

What all of this suggests to me is not that Texas shouldn't worry about health insurance, or that Texas should totally reject the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, as state leaders are threatening; we probably should take the Medicaid expansion, if only because the state and local government currently spends a lot of money on care for uninsured people, as Billy Hamilton (the state's former deputy comptroller) explained in a report earlier this year. 

Rather, the point here is that while health insurance and health are theoretically related, they're not the same thing, and the way people (Democrats) keep conflating the two is arguably counterproductive. I'll have more on this later today or tomorrow at Texas Monthly.