By applying free-market principles and extending a friendly hand to business, Texas has experienced a post-recession economic boom that’s unrivaled by any state other than shale-rich North Dakota. But even the bright Texas horizon has a few dark spots. As Steven Malanga at City Journal notes today:Thanks to its low state debt, Texas enjoys a reputation for budgetary restraint. Yet as Texas comptroller Susan Combs found to her dismay, the state’s towns, cities, counties, and school districts have racked up the second-highest per-capita local debt in the nation, behind only New York’s spendthrift municipalities. The total, nearly $8,000 per resident, is more than seven times higher than Texas’s per-capita state debt. Over the last decade, local debt in the Lone Star State has more than doubled, growing at twice the rate of inflation plus population growth. At the moment, Texas localities owe $63 billion for education funding—155 percent more than they did a decade ago, though student enrollment and inflation during that period grew less than one-third as quickly. The borrowing has also paid for a host of expensive new athletic facilities, such as a $60 million high school football stadium, complete with video scoreboard, in the Dallas suburb of Allen.
So while Texas’s state officials, led by thrifty Governor Rick Perry, generally do a bang-up job, the Lone Star State’s localities are borrowing with abandon. As Malanga observed in another piece from earlier this year, Texas’s high school football culture has something to do with that:
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