In recent years, tax and expenditure limits – legal limits on how fast government spending and taxes can grow each year based on some measure of economic activity – have received increasing attention at the state level as a result of the success of Colorado’s Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights. Not all tax and expenditure limitation measures are created equal: Texas’ is one of the least effective in the nation.
Texas DOGE Roars to Life
Nearly one year ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 14 in an effort to “slash regulations, put stricter standards on new regulations that could be costly to businesses, and put a check on the growth of the administrative state.” All worthy goals too considering the Lone Star State’s cumbersome regulatory environment, which recently ranked “as the fifth most-regulated…in the nation, after California,...