How hard can it be?

The Star-Telegram's Gregg Cantrell lays out a sobering history of "joke" candidates for governor in Texas. It doesn't bode well for a Kinky Friedman administration. A Friedman administration is not going to happen, but Mr Cantrell's column does foretell something that is likely to happen that does mirror the distant past.

Gov Perry has appointed Tom Pauken chairman of something called the Texas Task Force on Appraisal Reform. Despite the noble sounding name, the purpose of the task force seems to be nothing more than a disguised push to cut taxes again. The national real estate boom has not bypassed Texas. Those rising property values lead to rising appraisals. With a steady tax rate, that leads to rising tax collections. Normally, prosperity is considered a good thing. Rising incomes and rising wealth are normally things politicians trumpet. Given that Texas ranks near dead last among the states in education, you'd think people would welcome the new prosperity to allow Texas to finally do something about that. You'd be wrong. Many people think the reason for Texas' falling educational standards is that schools have too much money. So, they want to cap appraisals or cap tax revenue to make sure that none of our new-found prosperity is spent on schools or other local gov't needs.

What does Mr Cantrell's history lesson have to tell us about this? Well, one of those "joke" candidates for governor all those years ago, "Farmer Jim" Ferguson, ran on a platform that promised to cap the rents that landlords could charge to tenant farmers. "Farmer Jim" Ferguson was elected. The rest, as they say, is history:

Ferguson was ultimately impeached, convicted on a lengthy list of corruption charges and banned from holding office in Texas. Never one to back down, he ran his wife, Miriam (who became "Ma" to his "Pa" in the public vernacular), for governor in 1924, promising "two governors for the price of one." Ma won, and she served a second term in the 1930s. Legislative ineffectiveness and outright corruption were the principal hallmarks of her administrations.

That's the trouble with simplistic solutions to complex problems. Voters go for them in a big way because they promise so much for so little. But in reality, they bring with them more problems than they solve. How hard can it be? Plenty hard, as it turns out. Whether it's the rent caps of yesteryear, or the appraisal caps of today, beware politicians from Austin promising simple solutions. And that's no joke.