Texas legislators have formed a posse aimed at holding someone accountable for a sluggish response to sexual abuse of teenagers by Texas Youth Commission employees at Texas Youth Commission facilities.

State Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, likens it to the multiple investigations in Congress of shoddy follow-up care for wounded Iraq war veterans, after their discharge from the hospital itself.

Shapleigh, a continuing advocate for Texas caring for its people, says the underlying problem is that not enough is spent on the front end to adequately fund services like public schools and health care, to help produce productive, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens for Texas' future.

Meeting public needs is often outsourced -- including such fiascos as the Accenture L.L.P-led private group running call centers for assistance programs like Medicaid -- or simply starved by lawmakers opposed to government, Shapleigh says.

Lost somewhere, Shapleigh contends, is the idea that government, while not perfect, often can provide public services better and at less expense than profit-making companies -- if the public institutions are appropriately funded.

"In our government, budgets reflect our values," Shapleigh maintains.

"We rank first nationally in the percentage of uninsured children and 49th in the percentage of children with immunizations," Shapleigh says. "We have fewer Texans with post-high school degrees than any other state. In a world where what you earn is based on what you learn, our graduates are 48th in average SAT scores."

Too often in Washington and Austin, the focus is on lean budgets and tax cuts rather than enough funding to get the job done. Short-term spending cuts may look good, but failure to provide good education and health care to our youngsters damages many of them over the long term.

Some forward-thinking legislators like Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, and Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano, who chair their chambers' committees on criminal justice, want to stress treatment and rehabilitation for non-violent prisoners rather than just long, long sentences. They say not only does it have a better long-term result, it saves money.

While certainly those who commit crimes should be punished, we also need to consider why they go to our juvenile and adult prisons in the first place. In many cases, it's because our state government paid them too little attention while they were young.

Yet Texas spends about three times as much each year for each prison inmate as it does for each public school student.

Even while some legislators like Shapleigh say there's a crying need for more investment to bring Texas out of the cellar among the states in many areas, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's top budget priority is tax cuts. Of a presumed $14.3 billion surplus for 2008-9, Dewhurst wants $6.9 billion spent for tax cuts, and another $3 billion held to cut taxes in 2010-11. Yet, the Legislative Budget Board says the biggest percentage tax cuts for 2008 go to the richest 20 percent.

Dewhurst wants a $2.1 billion increase in base spending for schools, and a population growth adjustment for Medicaid, CHIP, prisons and education of 3.2 percent over two years. That's about half the rate of inflation. Texas currently ranks 49th among the states in taxes per person.

Texas is a "conservative" state, if conservative means spending as few tax dollars as possible in the short run, rather than conserving people in the long run by investing in education and health care. Stingy spending by the governor and Legislature may look good at the end of the fiscal year. But the bill comes due big-time at the end of what should have been the high school years.