In a speech to a group of county officials in June 1987, according to the Abilene Reporter-News, Mr. Perry said the state had only three choices to close its spending gap: cut spending, boost state sales taxes, or move toward a state income tax. He said he wasn’t advocating an income tax, but “we need to start talking about it…Someday this may be the only thing we’ve got left. We’re fast approaching that day,” he said, according the Abilene paper, which ran the story under the headline: “Perry: Let’s Think About Income Tax.” In the meantime, he favored hiking the state sales tax to cover the budget deficit.
He appeared to be even more positive about a new state tax seven months later in another Abilene Reporter-News story. The story quoted Mr. Perry talking to a group of insurance underwriters. He “told the group that the time had arrived when ‘forward looking, intelligent’ Texans should not be afraid to say ‘income tax,’” the story said.
From The San Antonio Express-News:
In the final week of Gov. Rick Perry's 2006 re-election campaign, his two biggest donors got out their checkbooks and into a gray area.
On the same day that Houston homebuilder Bob Perry received three phone calls from someone at the Republican Governors Association, he overnighted a $500,000 check to the group.
Two days later, the executive director of the RGA personally handed Perry a contribution for the same amount.Records of the phone calls between Bob Perry, no relation to the governor, and the RGA were contained in a lawsuit filed by Rick Perry's unsuccessful Democratic challenger, Chris Bell.
While Texas law allows for unlimited contributions, lawyers on behalf of Bell believe the contributions were routed through the RGA because the Perry campaign had attacked Bell for accepting a $1 million contribution from the late Houston trial lawyer John O'Quinn.
From The New York Times:
Although his 2010 book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington,” describes his outrage that federal bureaucrats distributed more than $245 billion in farm subsidies from 1995 to 2009, the governor received some of that money. Mr. Perry, a former West Texas cotton farmer, received at least $83,000 in federal farm subsidies between 1987 and 1998, during the time he was in elected office, according to his tax returns.
At the Republican Leadership Conference in June, Mr. Perry said that while government plays an important role in helping a city recover from a disaster, “the real recovery” stems from hard-working individuals. Unfortunately, he added, Mr. Obama believed government was the answer to every need, a sign of the “arrogance and audacity” of the White House.
