A Pretty Good Bang for the Buck, Indeed

by Karl Kurtz

An article by R. G. Ratcliffe in yesterday's Houston Chronicle begins:

When Texas lawmakers met in 1963, former state legislator Carl Parker of Beaumont had no office of his own and kept files under his desk on the chamber floor.

The cost of a legislative session in 1963: $2.9 million.

Forty-six years later, the Legislature is big business. The 81st Texas Legislature, which adjourned earlier this month, runs on a year-round support staff of more than 1,800 workers.

The cost per year: $171.5 million.

The cost of the 140-day session that ended June 1: $9.1 million.

That's an engaging lead, but missing from the article is any consideration of inflation.  That $2.9 million for a session in 1963?  It translates into $20.2 million in 2009 dollars (CPI inflation calculator). Apparently, the cost of a legislative session in Texas today is less than half of what it was in 1963 in constant dollars! 

The article didn't provide the 1963 annual cost of the legislative session, so we can't perform the same calculation for that number.  Had the reporter provided it and made the inflation calculation, it probably would have shown a substantial increase in constant dollars. The reason is that Texas session costs almost certainly have been shifted to year-round costs as the permanent staff of the Legislature is much larger than it was in 1963.

So the cost of running the Texas Legislature has almost certainly gone up in real terms, as it has in all states as legislatures have modernized and professionalized their operations.

Other statistics not mentioned in the article are that the annual cost of the Texas Legislature of $171.5 million comes out to $6.96 per capita or that it's only about 0.3 percent of the state's general expenditures.  That's also consistent with other states. The cost of state legislatures is relatively trivial: In no state does the cost of the legislature exceed one-half of one percent of state general expenditures.

Fortunately, the article ends with a comment that I couldn't agree with more:

Michael Quinn Sullivan, president of the conservative Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, said given the size of state government overall when Texas is compared to other states, he is not disturbed by how much the Legislature spends on itself.

“In a sense, you could say we’re getting a pretty good bang for the buck,” Sullivan said.