March 24, 2017      5:44 PM

HK: Why a special session on the budget has proven to be a bad idea

It’s not only the fact that the appropriators work while everyone else gets into mischief

As the toxic relationship between the Lt. Governor and Speaker has become increasingly public, even Capitol veterans gasped when Joe Straus described the Senate’s transportation funding deferment) as “Enron-esque” accounting. The issue boils down to using some amount of the “people’s assets” stashed in the Rainy Day Fund.  The House thinks honesty in accounting trumps smoke and mirrors in defense of some arbitrary not so conservative principle like pay as you go.

For those of you young staffers, Enron was a Houston superstar energy corporation that flamed out into scandal and extinction because of shifty accounting and off-balance sheet shenanigans. Deferring payments in order to balance the budget has been standard procedure during crises, but in the faux age of self-promoted transparency, efforts to obscure should be used sparingly.

But I digress. 

By Harvey Kronberg

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