There’s petty, and then there’s petty.
Last year, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo (basically Houston’s county mayor) announced plans for a guaranteed income pilot program that would provide a randomly selected group of 1,928 eligible low-income residents with $500, no strings attached, guaranteed income every month for 18 months. It’s nothing new. Cities and counties across the US and even across Texas have been implementing these pilot programs for the last few years with great success — showing that “just throwing money at it” is, in fact, a great way to handle the problem of poverty.
The program is funded by $20.5 million from the American Rescue Plan, not any Texas tax dollars.
But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton isn’t having any of it. This week, he announced that he was actually going to sue Harris County over the program, which he claims violates the Texas constitution.
He claims:
The Texas Constitution expressly forbids “any county, city, town or other political corporation or subdivision of the State … to grant public money or thing of value in aid of, or to any individual.” Harris County’s program to give public money away with no conditions, no control over expenditure of that money, and no guarantee of public benefit is prohibited. The Constitution also provides that everyone has “equal rights, and no man, or set of men, is entitled to exclusive separate public emoluments.” This lottery-based handout violates the Texas Constitution because the selection of recipients is inherently arbitrary. County governments have limited authority to act and, like all governments, can only act in accordance with the Constitution. Harris County has exceeded that authority.
Here, in full, is the part of the Texas constitution that Mean Old Miser Paxton claims the program violates:
The Legislature shall have no power to make any grant or authorize the making of any grant of public moneys to any individual, association of individuals, municipal or other corporations whatsoever; provided that the provisions of this Section shall not be construed so as to prevent the grant of aid in cases of public calamity.
Well, Harris County is not “the Legislature” and this is quite clearly “the grant of aid in cases of public calamity” — for those who would consider poverty a calamity.
According to the Stanford Basic Income Lab and the Center for Guaranteed Income Research:
The largest share of expenditures went to retail sales and services, at 36%. Food and groceries were the second highest at 32%. Transport and housing/utilities were next, at 9% and 9%, respectively, followed by financial transactions at 6% and travel/leisure/entertainment at 4%. Healthcare, miscellaneous, and educational expenses made up the final 4%.
If children are not going hungry, that is a public benefit. If people are taking that money and spending it at local businesses, that is a public benefit. If they are taking it and spending it on housing, that is a public benefit. The fact that these programs have caused employment rates to rise among participants is a public benefit. This is all a public benefit, because none of us lives in a vacuum and, yes, a rising tide lifts all boats.
Guaranteed income pilot programs are Republicans’ worst nightmare. Not because they don’t work, as some often say “just throwing money at a problem” does not, but because they do. And the fact that they work upends just about every criticism they’ve ever had about any program designed to help the poor. There is low administrative cost so they actually cost less than traditional welfare programs and studies show that when you give people money with no strings attached, they spend it wisely — not on booze and drugs as conservatives would like to believe. Not only that, those who participate in the pilot programs are actually more likely to find work than those who do not.
You see, it’s not just that the Right doesn’t want to help the poor, but that they are wholly reliant on perpetuating the fiction that people are poor because they are lazy and sinful. It is that belief, along with the belief that the only real way to help people is to do nothing and let them hit rock bottom, that makes it possible for people to tolerate income inequality, tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires, price gouging, corporate welfare, or even just walking down the street and seeing unhoused people sitting on the sidewalks.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Judge Hidalgo responded to the announcement, calling it “cruel” and “unscrupulous,” and noted that Paxton even waited until people had been notified that they had been selected as participants to try to shut it down. I guess now he can check “taking food right out people’s mouths” off on his bucket list.
Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that the very conservative Texas Supreme Court will see things that way, particularly considering that Justice John Devine appears to have a vendetta against Houston and Harris County in particular.
It would be lovely if he and the other justices could put that and partisan politics aside for a moment in order to see that this program in no way violates the Texas constitution or any other laws for that matter, but we’re not going to hold our breath.
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