Perry’s account of stimulus worth questioning

[sonias]

AAS First Reading blog 1/08/10
Perry’s account of stimulus worth questioning
(snip)
Let’s go back to 2009. Congress approved the federal stimulus package, Gov. Rick Perry said the state would seek to use the dollars for one-time expenses, Texas accepted most of the money and it was used for more than one-time expenses. We can all agree on that, right?

Apparently not.

In Houston yesterday, Perry was talking about his desire to see a balanced-budget amendment in the U.S. Constitution. Then, talking about Texas, he said, "The argument … you took stimulus dollars so therefore you were part of this problem — no, we took dollars, put them into place, one-time expenditures," Perry said. "We said we would not create any new programs with these dollars that were ongoing costs," according to the Associated Press.

Whether new programs were created could be a matter of interpretation. For example, some of the most knowledgeable staffers in the Legislature have told me that the $2 billion bill updating the school finance formulas would not have been possible without the stimulus dollars. Do you call a reworking of school finance programs a new ongoing program? Seems like that argument could certainly been made.

There are a couple of links in the story to other news items showing the stimulus was used for ongoing budget expenses - in other words Perry lies like a pro, aka a typical republican politician.

Perry will just make up some revisionist history and keep repeating it so the lazy media repeats it enough to become "reality". That's the one trick the Rs are really good at. Keep repeating something until enough people believe it's true.

Example - all the bush talking heads who keep insisting that America was not attacked on U.S. soil during the bush administration. Giuliani, Mr 9-11, spewed this very lie today.

Perry is a damned liar and very few in the media call him on it. :grr:

Sonia