Governor Rick Perry Must Go

Posted on January 12th, 2010 by iwaller

Palin___Perry.jpgSecessionist Texas Governor Rick Perry has stood against hardworking Texans from his initial arrival in the Governor’s Office.  From the murder of an innocent man, to extremely high homeowner and health care insurance rates; skyrocketing college tuition and forcing eminent domain to grab Texans’ land, puts Perry as the worst Republican to lead Texas in recent history.  Perry welcomed the endorsement of Sarah Palin, “I can see Russia from my house”, who quit the Alaska Governorship

Texans pay the highest homeowner insurance rates in the nation, an average annual premium of $1,409 per year, and nearly twice the national average of $804. (Source: Lubbock Avalanche-Journal)Perry permitted the industry to double overnight the premiums paid by Texas homeowners and refused to rein in exorbitant rates from his biggest campaign contributors. (Source: Mcblogger.com)

A February 2009 survey showed that 85% of Texans supported regulation of the insurance industry – yet Rick Perry and Texas Republicans fought insurance reform efforts during the 2009 legislative session. (Source: Hill Research Consultants)

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs – run by Perry’s hand-picked political appointees – has still, four years after Hurricane Rita, only distributed one-third of the reimbursements that Texas homeowners along the coast are due. (Source: Houston Chronicle)

March 2009 Rick Perry rejected $555 million in federal stimulus money that would have expanded unemployment benefits for Texans during Bush’s financial collapse.

Perry had to reverse this decision and ask the federal government for a $170 million loan with interest, so that benefits could get paid. (Source: Think Progress)    In 2003 Perry also asked for this loan only one other time, in 2003.

Perry did not want to provide help to 45,000 out-of-work Texans including part-time employees like single mothers, college students and senior citizens.  It would have avoided the unemployment insurance tax hike for all Texas businesses. Perry already increased taxes on businesses in February 2009 when he replaced the Franchise tax with the Margin tax, the first corporate income tax in the history of Texas. The Margin Tax IS an income tax on corporations. (Source: OpEdNews-John-Basel)

Every time Texans turn on the lights they pay the price as Texas homeowners struggle to pay the highest utility rates in the nation due to Rick Perry and his fellow Texas Republicans’ failed experiment with utility deregulation.

Rick Perry and his hand-picked appointees to the Public Utility Commission failed to protect Texas consumers. Texas taxpayers are left with less money in their pockets while electric providers continue to profit

  • Texans’ utility rates skyrocketed 64% between 1999 and 2007, families in Houston and Dallas pay the highest utility rates in the entire nation. (Source: Associated Press, Dallas Morning News)
  • Utility deregulation has given rise to prepaid electric providers. These providers are sometimes run by convicted criminals who market to “poor, sick, and disabled” Texans and charge consumers rates up to 50% higher than average. (Source: Dallas Morning News) Texas Democratic Party
  • Some Texans on fixed incomes are forced to choose between paying their electric bill and buying groceries. Meanwhile, money in the System Benefit Fund – which was created to help low-income families pay their utility bills – continues to be diverted away from its intended purpose. Since 2002, more than half of all the money collected for the System Benefit Fund has been spent on things other than reducing utility rates. (Source: Dallas Morning News)

In 2005 and 2007 Perry said he would sign an eminent domain bill to protect homeowners, IT NEVER HAPPENED and property owners still are at the mercy of government taking away their properties without providing REAL monetary reimbursement for their lost property.  Perry attempted to take 600,000 acres from Texans for a toll road.

Home foreclosures in Texas are at the highest rate ever. Property taxes continue to escalate every year and homeowners also pay the highest insurance premiums anywhere in the nation. (Source: Capitol Hill Blue)

Under Perry’s rule 2000-2009 Texas now has the highest rate of uninsured people in the nation and Perry is fighting against health insurance reform choosing to protect the obscene profits of big insurance companies instead of more than 24,000 Texans who lose their health care coverage every month.

  • Over 25% of Texans do not have health care, the highest rate of uninsured in the country including 1 out 5 of our children (Source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
  • Those who still do have health care have seen their premiums increase 91.6% over the last decade – five times faster than the increase in median income. (Source: Austin American-Statesman)
  • Perry’s “Pay to Play” politics led him to send $899 million to an offshore call center in Bermuda – a privatization scheme that deeply cost Texas taxpayers and resulted in over 237,000 children losing their health insurance through CHIP. (Source: San Antonio Express-News)

A national report says family insurance premiums in Texas increased 91.6 percent since 2000, 4.6 times faster than earnings.  Health care premiums for workers went from $6,638 for the average Texas family to $12,721 a year, but folks often got less for their money rather than more, according to the report. At the same time, median earnings of Texas workers rose from $23,032 to $27,573, a 19.7 percent increase. (Source: Statesman)

Perry wanted to FORCE millions of young teenage girls to be immunized against the human papillomavirus (HPV); at $360 a shot, would have given one of Perry’s biggest donors, Merck, millions in profits.

Gov. Rick Perry concocted a plan to convert Federal highways in Texas to tollways, in violation of the most basic principles of open government, the Trans Texas Corridor Plan was the “the biggest land grab in the history of Texas”, attempting to take 600,000 acres from Texans.   (Impeach Perry) This failed plan cost $59.4 million for a bad idea, and there may not be an off ramp for Texas taxpayers who will be footing the bill for this massive failure for years to come.  Perry wanted his ‘toll road’ to be operated by a foreign company.

October 7, 2009, Perry is not giving up on his relentless pursuit of toll roads. Should Perry be re-elected, aides close to him have stated that “he would try to put Texas back on the path to private toll roads.” (Source: Dallas Morning News)

  • Just planning Rick Perry’s 600-mile Trans-Texas Corridor cost Texas taxpayers $59.4 million for a Rick Perry vanity exercise that would have destroyed as many as 500,000 acres of Texas farm and ranch land and created an unprecedented toll tax for Texas. (Source: Houston Chronicle)
  • Paying the price of Perry’s failure is business as usual for Texans, and nothing illustrates how Rick Perry is bad business for Texas taxpayers more than the $1 billion accounting error Perry’s hand-picked appointees at the Texas Department of Transportation made as Perry planned to put a toll tax on every Texan. (Source: San Antonio Business Journal)
  • Earlier this year, Gov. Perry’s agency heads at the Texas Department of Transportation admitted their plans to spend over $800 million in stimulus dollars – 70% of all the federal tax dollars targeted for Texas transportation funding – on toll road projects, a hypocritical proposal considering Perry’s opposition to the stimulus funds. (Source: Houston Chronicle – via Texas Kaos)

Rick Perry murdered an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham, who lost his 3 little girls in a house fire and Cameron was charged, convicted and sentenced to death.  Evidence was ginned up by Texas Fire marshals but long before Perry refused to delay his execution, The Innocence Project and determined forensics were false and proved his innocence. Perry knew this but allowed Cameron to be innocently murdered. (Source: Chicago Tribune)

2007 Perry lobbied to deregulate higher education tuition, promising Texans that doing so would decrease the cost of a college education while making institutions more competitive.  After 3 successive tuition increases since the proposal was accepted, tuition costs are the highest ever in the state.

The average cost of attending Texas’ colleges and universities has skyrocketed by 136% from 2003 to 2008 – the consequence of a failed tuition deregulation scheme concocted by Rick Perry and Texas Republicans.

  • In 2003, the statewide average for the cost of tuition was $625, by 2008; the cost had skyrocketed to $1,477, an increase of 136%. (Source: Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board)
  • During the same time period, 14,000 fewer students received TEXAS Grants – funding to help pay the cost of tuition for students in need – at a time when student loans account for 63% of all the aid received. (Source: Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board)
  • Due to the rising cost of tuition, the Texas Tomorrow Fund – now named the Texas Guaranteed Tuition Plan – is broke, and Texas taxpayers will have to spend $2.1 billion to make up the shortfall. (Source: San Antonio Express-News)

Governor Perry opposed the 2009 stimulus package, which was to send at least $3.7 billion to Texas’ public schools which would provide funds for 1,031 Texas school districts and 8,061 schools helping pay for new textbooks, provide teachers with a pay raise, and improve achievement in low-performing schools.

April 2009 – According to the Houston Star-Telegram. “When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.”  Rick Perry whipped up his teabagger supporters proposing Texas secede from the United States.  (Source: Huffington Post)  The Supreme Court ruled decades ago secession from the Union is illegal.

Rick Perry’s campaign contributions: (Source: Project Vote Smart)

2000 – $4,056,424

2002 – $20,674,811

2004 -$10,299,759

2006- $20,199,539

2008 – $10,147,128

Significant financial support came from Finance, Insurance & Real Estate, Energy & Natural Resources (Big Oil), Lawyers & Lobbyists, Health and Transportation.

Instead of working to find sensible solutions, Perry has spent the last decade pursuing politically-driven policies that cost Texas taxpayers and raise taxes on businesses. Rick Perry’s failure to address the rising cost of health care, rising homeowner insurance rates, rising college tuition, rising teen pregnancy rates, poor fiscal responsibility and low teacher pay are some of the many reasons he has failed Texas.

Perry continues to be a very controversial figure nationally for his close associations to racists and other controversial elements.  Texas does NOT need Rick Perry as Governor!

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One Response to “Governor Rick Perry Must Go”

  1. Sarah Sofia , on January 18th, 2010 at 6:55 pm Said:

    interesting! and I had no idea about that! but understandable that he isn’t exactly your favorite!

    ML; Sarah Sofia

    [Reply]

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