Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

"The Great Texas Tax Shift"

Since 1836, Texas has stood as an icon of the American dream.  

Blessed with land, rivers, oil, and other abundant natural resources, early Texas welcomed everyone from cattle ranchers to braceros, from cotton farmers to Chinese railroad workers.  These pioneers built a great state, and together we fulfilled a destiny.

From humble beginnings, we built a state with the firm belief that every Texan might rise as high and as far as their spirit, hard work, and talent might carry them. With education and determination every Texan might achieve great success – home ownership, reliable healthcare, safe neighborhoods and financial prosperity.   

In Texas today, the American dream is distant.  Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured children in the nation.  Texas is dead last in the percentage of residents with their high school diploma and near last in SAT scores.  Texas now has America’s dirtiest air. If we do not change course, for the first time in our history, the Texas generation of tomorrow will be less prosperous than the generation of today.

In fact, the state demographer predicts family incomes in Texas will decline by $6,500 within 20 years unless our state has the courage and leadership to invest in the minds of Texas students of tomorrow.
 
Without the courage to invest in rigorous quality public education and affordable college, we face a daunting prospect. Those who value tax cuts over children and budget cuts over college have put Texas at risk in her ability to compete and succeed.

At the heart of our future is a tax system created by and for the wealthiest Texans. over the last five years, Rick Perry and Tom Craddick quietly killed the Texas inheritance tax and instead moved the burden of revenues for college tuition to thousands of Texas students who now have a distant dream of college in the face of rising tuition. More and more, the tax burden in Texas has shifted to local property tax payers who pay for public schools and hospitals, to ordinary citizens who pay exorbitant fees for driving infractions, new business income taxes and licenses, and finally to working families who pay one of the highest sales taxes in America.

Quietly, Perry and Craddick have shifted the tax burden in Texas from the wealthy few to you. Your property taxes are now 15th highest in America and for elderly Texans, just holding onto their home is a daily challenge.

This chapter on Texas taxes tells the story of the Great Texas Tax Shift.

Let us resolve now to invest in young Texans today to create a tax system fair enough to fund our future in order to guarantee the prosperity of all Texans tomorrow.

Let us not forget that the business of Texas is Texans.  To ‘Close the Gap’ in Texas, we must graduate more of our best and brightest with the skills to succeed in a world based on knowledge. If we invest in our greatest resource, Texas will be the state of the future.

Eliot Shapleigh