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Update at 3:02 p.m.: Perry?s office changed the fine print on the web tool to say, ?Note: These numbers are annual estimates.?
That replaced the original version?s caveat, after the tax-cut options were listed, of: ?Note: These numbers are estimates.?
Original item at 6:32 a.m.: Someone building Gov. Rick Perry?s latest feedback loop had their own ?oops? moment, it seems.
On Tuesday, as he gave his seventh State of the State address, Perry invited members of the public to share their ideas of what the best methods would be for cutting state taxes.
But his office erred in building a web site to gather the feedback, using mismatched numbers in a way that may make participants think his proposed $1.8 billion for tax cuts will go twice as far as it actually will.
The new website is called the ?Tax Relief for Texans Estimator?.
As of late Wednesday, the incongruity had not been fixed.
The background: Perry?s office placed annual figures for the costs of various tax-cut options listed on the left side of the page. They?re all tweakings of sales, property and business-franchise taxes that have been kicked around for years. As visitors select a particular cut, the cost gets rung up on a fever chart on the right. That feature caps a respondent?s choices at $1.8 billion. However, that figure is a two-year cap, when the selections have been tallied by their one-year cost.
Bottom line: When visitors make their choices, they?re effectively given twice as many bucks to play with as they would have, say, if they were very important legislators ? or Perry himself.
Asked if the tax-cut options? costs were expressed in yearly or biennial figures, Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle late Wednesday responded, ?Yes, annual numbers.?
Gov. Rick Perry
Castle didn?t reply to a query about how the mix-up happened.
Nor did she respond when asked whether, for accuracy?s sake, the governor?s office would fix the site so that visitors only could be given $1.8 billion worth of choices, not $3.6 billion.
Given the mix-up, shouldn?t you start the count of responses all over, I asked?
Castle offered no reply, though she did answer my final questions, which were about what kind of response the Republican governor has been getting, and what he planned to do with the information the Estimator gathers.
?We will share the results with members of the Legislature,? she wrote in an email. ?So far we?ve had 537 responses.?
The website asks if people are Texans, whether they own a business and if so, if they are sole proprietors. But it doesn?t gather email addresses; it merely flashes to respondents this message:
?Your formula has been received. Thank you very much for participating and doing what you can to keep Texas the best place in the world to live, work, raise a family and build your business.?
The website doesn?t ask the public whether it favors Perry?s proposal to fund $840 million of the $1.8 billion in tax cuts with money drawn from the state?s rainy day fund. The rest would come from available general-purpose revenue.
Comptroller Susan Combs says the rainy day fund will have $11.8 billion by the end of the next budget cycle. Perry has fiercely resisted more than a very partial use of the savings account to alleviate budget cuts to schools, colleges and health care programs. He has argued that rainy-day dollars generally shouldn?t be used for ongoing expenses, just for one-time costs such as disaster-response efforts. The only way a tax cut won?t be an ongoing expense, though, is if it?s temporary. That could lead to an unpleasant future vote to restore the status quo ante ? a vote a GOP primary opponent could claim was a vote to raise taxes.
Maybe the legislators will conduct their own poll on that.
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