Texas Senate Budget Exceeds Frozen Texas Budget

​An Overview

• Texans for Fiscal Responsibility provided a three-step process to eliminate all property taxes over the next decade by simply limiting government spending at the state and local levels of government and returning surplus collected taxpayer dollars to taxpayers.

• Unfortunately, the Texas Senate’s budget appropriates too much taxpayer money. It substantially increases all funds appropriations in the proposed 2024-25 budget above the 2022-23 budget by 16.3% to $308.0 billion and increases state funds appropriations (exclude federal funds) by 25.4% to $208.6 billion. Even excluding property tax relief effort amounts in the 2022-23 and 2024-25 budgets, all funds appropriations increase by 19.4%, and state funds appropriations increase by 20.9%, which are well above the rate of population growth plus inflation over the last two fiscal years of 16%.

• These increases in appropriations would be better allocated to new property tax relief, primarily through compression of school district maintenance and operations property taxes. This is the way to create a path to eliminating these property taxes, thereby giving Texans more of the right to own their property instead of perpetually renting from the government.

Originally published by Texans for Fiscal Responsibility.