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Yesterday, 40 of our nation's governors met with President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden in Philadelphia to discuss the current fiscal crisis.
Also yesterday, two governors wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal where they effectively said "thanks, but no thanks" to any Federal bailout funds to their states. Yes, Rick Perry (R-TX) and Mark Sanford (R-SC) have said they want us all to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps.
So maybe Perry doesn't want the $2.2 billion in earmarks Texas received for FY 2008? There are 539 of them, and only California received more. You can see the historical earmarks for Texas here. Sanford gets a pass here, not much earmark money flows to South Carolina. "Not much" meaning millions instead of billions, so there is hardly any oversight.
I'm wondering if they actually want to pass on Federal dollars: turns out that Texas receives about 30% of its budget from the Feds in one form or another. That number is more than $50 Billion.
South Carolina has an annual budget of over $20 billion dollars, of which more than a third is funded by the Feds.
It makes me question which Federal funds these guys want their states to no longer receive, and which programs they'd like to start funding on their own.
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