Robbed as a 'Donor State?' That's a Good Reason for #TEXIT and #NationalDivorce
Texans Pay $453 Billion a Year for a Government That Costs $295 Billion
Texans Pay $453 Billion a Year for a Government That Costs $295 Billion
(Texian Partisan) - Daniel Miller gave the entire hour of this week’s Late Night Coffee Talk to a walkthrough of the Texas Nationalist Movement’s rewritten “Can Texas Make It?” report, three days ahead of its August 3 release. The 2015 original ran twelve pages and answered one question, whether Texas paid more into the federal system than it got back. The new version runs 46 pages and asks a harder one. Taxed exactly as they are taxed today, with no state income tax, do Texans already raise enough to pay for every function of government in Texas if Texas governed itself? Miller said the answer is yes, and that it is not a theory.
He walked the arithmetic on screen. Across the six most recent fiscal years with complete data, 2019 through 2024, Texans paid an average of $351.9 billion in federal taxes and $101.7 billion in state taxes and fees, $453.5 billion a year for two governments. Take out the $176.9 billion in portable individual benefits that follow a person to Florida or to Portugal, Social Security, Medicare, veterans cash benefits and federal pensions, then take out the $50.7 billion annual average of one-time pandemic relief, and the full cost of government in Texas lands at $295.3 billion. Run the same balance-of-payments method the Rockefeller Institute and WalletHub use, Miller said, and Texas still overpays…
