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 Wall of text on the death of Ross Perot, and the real intersection of boomer capital / race politics.

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Ross Perot died this week, and those who are old enough or have studied past elections will know him as the billionaire third party candidate that effectively got Bill Clinton elected in 1992 by siphoning economic conservatives from Bush Sr's campaign. In that campaign he was vocally anti free-trade, which of course resonated with the uneducated middle/lower class people who were duped into a decade of Reagan.

More people than are familiar with that history will probably have noticed that Bernie Sanders praised Perot on Twitter after his death, which on the surface seems odd compared to Bernie's recent public spat with another billionaire on the same social media platform. This post is an attempt to contextualize Ross Perot in local Texas politics and more broadly in suburban white America as a whole.

The Texas School Funding 14th Amendment Lawsuits

Perot's billions were made in the computer business before the computer business was a thing for anyone but IBM and Texas Instruments. He first got involved in politics locally in Texas due to the poor state of the public education system in Texas in the 70s and 80s. He used to say (paraphrased) that a school system which didn't produce graduates smart enough for him to hire was a failure that demanded his attention.

Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the late 1990s, Texas went through a sort of civil war over the nature of public school district funding. The lawsuits started in San Antonio from an organization founded by the superintendent of the predominantly Hispanic school district there, Jose Cardenas. Cardenas wrote a book about all of this which is available for free in pdf form here.

The case eventually went to the US Supreme Court and was decided based on the swing vote of a Nixon appointee. The 5th Circuit appeals court had ruled the Texas school funding infrastructure unconstitutional, in that it did not provide equal funding for poor school districts in comparison to wealthier school districts. Since school funding is almost universally done by property tax in the United States, schools with high property values enjoy higher revenues on lower tax rates, while schools with low property values are required to maintain higher tax rates to meet minimum state funding requirements.

There is a wikipedia article on the case with a pretty good broad overview here.

It should not be surprising that SCOTUS conservatives aided by a recent Nixon appointee determined that there was "no right to education in the constitution" despite the whole civil rights movement stemming from a school segregation decision.

The Texas State Constitutional Challenges

Not deterred, Cardenas continued to challenge the school funding infrastructure that resulted in unequal tax burdens in the state courts, and surprisingly he eventually won.

The Texas state constitution requires that the state provide an "efficient system of free public schools." The plaintiffs from San Antonio argued based on tax burden grounds that the state failed to provide this required system because of the tax burden disparity between wealthy and poor districts. The state courts agreed, eventually resulting in a 9-0 ruling by the state supreme court that invalidated the state's system of school funding in 1993. The lawsuit was initially filed in 1984. The court ordered the legislature to rewrite its entire school funding infrastructure to comply with the ruling. Several conservative challenges to the lawsuit and failed legislative proposals eventually led to the state supreme court ordering a commission to be appointed that would rewrite the state school funding laws itself, without input from the legislature due to the legislature effectively being held in contempt of the ruling.

Ross Perot was the defacto chairman of the commission. Even though he was not officially given the title of chairman, he was the only billionaire on the commission and could simply make state legislators (and governors) disappear by force of campaign/lobbying money. When the existing elected state school board opposed the commission's recommendations, he did precisely that. He demanded that the governor dismiss all of the elected state school board members from office for opposing the order of the court and it was done. When the appointed state education department secretary opposed this action, he too was fired.

At the time, Democrats were still the dominant party in Texas politics. Only one Republican had been governor in the 20th century (Bill Clements from 1979 to 1983). Clements was again governor from 1987 to 1991. After the single term of Ann Richards from 1991 to 1995, the bible thumper Republican era of George Bush Jr and Rick Perry began.

Why Does This Matter Outside of Texas?

The result of the Perot commission, eventually endorsed by both the centrist Republican Clements and the DNC endorsed Ann Richards was a plan by which wealthier school districts were ordered to redistribute excess funds to adjacent school districts which suffered from tax shortages which did not meet state requirements for public school funding at the court-established maximum property tax rate.

The entire fucking middle class conservative boomer existence is built upon residential property value. ALL... OF... IT

I can't really think of a way to emphasize this any more than the above, but it's true. That's why Bernie Sanders is praising Ross Perot on Twitter. Ross Perot temporarily tore down the system that maintains class segregation in the US, albeit on a state level that was specific to Texas.

I guarantee you that if you look at any residential house listing anywhere in the predominantly white suburban United States, its selling point will be "schools." They are the means by which middle to upper-middle class Republicans and center-libs maintain their economic status. By inflating their own property values and dumping the tax revenue therefrom into ever more expensive local school districts, wealth is maintained from generation to generation.

For a brief moment in the 1990s Texas was ordered to tear all of this down and fund schools equally. George Bush Junior ran specifically in opposition to all of this, and found a way to defeat it and simultaneously enrich his political party.

The Perot commission mandated teacher evaluation for competency so Bush Junior set out to specifically penalize teachers in poor school districts for poor test scores. A "habitually" deficient school district in terms of student test scores could eventually face mandatory teacher and administration firings when Bush Junior was done rewriting the state education code. Some of you may remember this as the "no child left behind" controversy at the national level under Bush Junior's presidency.

The Perot Commission also led to a baseline property tax rate that was required for means testing of school finance in each county, and the conservative response was to convince all counties to exceed the minimum rate and funnel the excess school spending in wealthy districts to contributors for construction projects, remodeling projects, iPads, laptops, football stadiums, etc etc etc. Under Bush Junior's reforms, as long as the district exceeded the minimum state property tax rate for school funding no one could be deemed discriminatory in terms of school funding. The state would pay poor districts to get them to the minimum, while boomer-laden suburbs went all-in on school funding with the promise of ever-higher property values to offset the taxes.

How Is This Issue Playing Out Today?

Here in Texas, the state is bankrupting itself on corrupt local school boards passing excessive property tax increases and skimming the money through school contractors with conflicts of interest. The latest bible thumper-Republican government's response has been to propose an increase in sales taxes that would be used to bribe counties into lowering school property tax rates. That plan failed in the legislature. Meanwhile, every major city in Texas has residential property tax rates in excess of 2% per year, with many of them exceeding 3% per year.

For those unfamiliar, property taxes are taxes on appraised value, not taxes on realized gains. So if you have a house that the county tax assessor deems to be worth $500,000 dollars, and the local rate is 3%, you owe $15,000 dollars of property tax every year, even if the property has never been actually sold for the amount in question.

Traditionally, the finance industry's recommendation to people is that they can afford a mortgage which all-inclusive represents 1/3 of their pre-tax income.

This figure is bullshit on multiple levels.

Firstly, again using a Texas example, a full third of people's pre-tax income can be sucked up by our country's abysmal for-profit health care system. Currently, a family of four getting ACA marketplace insurance in Texas can expect to pay $35,000 dollars per year (including the deductible). I live in one of those wealthy school cities in Texas, with an average household income of $110,000.

So let's say one of those average households goes out and buys a house that costs them $3,000 per month (roughly 1/3 of the monthly income from a $110,000 average yearly salary). Using the previous example, if they paid $100,000 dollars as a down payment toward the hypothetical $500,000 dollar house (20%) they'd be left with a loan of $400,000 dollars (at a rate of 4.5%). The mortgage cost of a $400,000 dollar loan for 30 years at 4.5% is only $2,000 per month, but they can't afford a $400,000 dollar mortgage because of the property taxes.

The $15,000 dollar property tax increases their monthly mortgage payment to about $3275 dollars. Add in $2000 dollars per year in homeowner's insurance and you're right around $3500 dollars per month. To get that back down to $3000, the typical household income has to limit their home purchase amount to a $400,000 dollar house, not a $500,000 dollar one.

With a $400,000 dollar house that the typical suburban conservative Christian Republican might buy, the mortgage payment on $320,000 (less the 20% down payment they would have paid of $80,000) is reduced to $1625 per month, plus that 3% property tax rate for another $1000 dollars per month, plus the $165 bucks per month in insurance leaves them at about $2800 dollars per month, just shy of the 1/3 pre-tax income range that someone might recommend to them. Considering the grossly inflated health care costs they're also paying, this is still quite sketchy.

tl;dr: Are you saying that people could oust local Republicans with property tax rebellions at the polls in places like Texas and Florida?

tl;dr: yes.

Texas is not the tax haven that it is perceived to be anymore. They are cruising toward a property tax and health care cost revolt which could cost the entire bible-thumper Republican establishment its stranglehold on local politics to anyone willing to challenge them, but as expected the DNC is completely inept on these issues. They have only put up one challenger for governor here in recent years; a woman who filibustered one of Rick Perry's anti-abortion bills in the state senate and she lost in a landslide. No one gives a fuck about abortion here except the bible thumpers. Blue voters in Texas are wealthy people in cities, who don't go to Planned Parenthood because they're wealthy. Meanwhile the middle class Republicans in the suburbs are being squeezed dry by the bible-thumper Republican politicians that they vote for, and most of those suburban Republicans run for local offices un-opposed.

Is this just a matter of FOIA'ing my local TX/FL school records?

I suspect this is why Texas and more recently the SCOTUS have a sudden fascination with tearing down the FOIA. Most states mirror the federal FOIA law, but Texas bible-thumper Republicans have begun to try to weaken it, specifically to hide the details of contracts with local political jurisdictions. In a recent Texas case the city of San Antonio tried to get details of a contract with Boeing to lease property at a local military airport owned by the state within the city's boundaries. Boeing sued to block the release of the contract details to the city, claiming that the negotiation of the lease terms with the state was proprietary. The bible-thumper Republican state attorney charged with defending the state FOIA law lost the case to Boeing at the state supreme court on purpose. It should not be surprising that a similar tactic was used in a recent SCOTUS case.

There's nothing more fashy for a bible-thumper Republican than giving a campaign contributor tax money and claiming that the public does not have a right to see how the money was spent, but that seems to be the latest pet project of the GOP.

What else might people do?

If rebellious leftists were smart they would be putting as much effort into state Attorney General races as they were on city District Attorney races. Fucking over cops is all fine and good but if you want to tear down the Republican establishment at the state and local level you need state Attorneys General to hit them in their grifts and frauds.

Property taxes + public school spending in the suburbs are the nexus of grift and fraud in vast amounts of fly-over territory in the US, and no one to my knowledge outside of Texas has ever challenged any of it.