Rick Perry: Inconvenient Truth for the Conservative of Conviction: The Texas Enterprise Fund

Texas Governor Rick Perry, despite his fundamental irrelevance in the tag-team brawl that is the struggle for the roll of Last Man Standing in the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, still has lots of Texas oil money to waste on attack ads and has therefore not yet withdrawn from the race, all substantive appearances to the contrary.

Perry also, those times he manages to complete a sentence, appears to be stoutly opposed to anything that can be construed as intervention or assistance from the government, stoutly maintaining his convenient conviction that he is a conservative of conviction, not of convenience. He even makes this point prominently on his campaign web site:

"I am a conservative of conviction, not of convenience. As president, I will take a wrecking ball to the Washington establishment and get government out of the way so we can get America working again." – Gov. Rick Perry

So you would think that there would be a level playing field unsullied by the sickly white hand of government intervention when it comes to, for example, companies thinking about establishing operations in Texas, the state Perry is governor of when he's not on the trail flubbing simple memory exercises.

Well, you thought wrong.

Rick Perry, as Texas Governor, presides over something called the Texas Enterprise Fund. What's that? Well, here's what its website claims:

At Gov. Rick Perry’s request, the 78th Texas Legislature established the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) in 2003 to help attract new jobs and investment to the state. The fund was renewed by the Legislature in 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011. As the largest “deal-closing” fund of its kind in the nation, the TEF continues to attract businesses to Texas. The fund is used only as a final incentive tool where a single Texas site is competing with another viable out-of-state option. Additionally, the TEF will only be considered to help close a deal that already has significant local support behind it from a prospective Texas community.

Businesses considering relocating to Texas (thereby siphoning jobs from other, less cowboy-hatted states) are routinely bribed by this fund. The results are proudly trumpeted by the Governor via his own official site, as here, from Nov. 7:

Gov. Rick Perry has announced the state is investing $650,000 through the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) in Flexsteel Pipeline Technologies Inc. (FlexSteel), which will invest $94.8 million in capital expenditures in a new manufacturing facility in Baytown, creating 130 new jobs...

"We at FlexSteel Pipeline Technologies are excited about expanding our manufacturing facilities into the great state of Texas," CEO Jeff Shorter said. "The economic development grants from the Texas Enterprise Fund were instrumental in our selection of Baytown as the destination for our new 280,000 square foot facility."

Now, doesn't handing over nearly a million dollars in cash of taxpayer money to a private company simply to encourage them to do something they were probably already going to do anyway strike you as odd, or even a little unethical, from a conservative standpoint? Perhaps not in Nigeria, Azerbaijan or Venezuela, but right here in the United States of Freedom?

No, you say, not if the cash-handing-out efforts of the Fund show proven job-creating results. A little shady and anti-competitive at the expense of other, less bribe-prone states, maybe, but a worthy effort and one that doesn't unfairly concentrate non-competitive and extremely corruption-prone power in the hands of handful of Perry cronies (and who are they, exactly? "Lastly, the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Speaker of the Texas House must unanimously agree in favor of a project in order for an award to be granted." Pretty short list.) who run the Texas Enterprise Fund.

But, according to a slew of recent reports, the cash-handing out efforts of the Fund do not, apparently, show proven job-creating results:

San Angelo Standard-Times: "Most companies that pledged to create jobs in 2010 under Texas Enterprise Fund contracts failed to hire enough employees or completely withdrew from their agreements, a new study found."

Dallas News: “Governor Perry’s jobs stimulus program is a classic example of government waste, fraud and abuse,”

American-Statesman: "As Rick Perry makes the Texas Enterprise Fund a centerpiece of his re-election campaign, his office has politically manipulated the troubled jobs program."

And the primary source, Texans for Public Justice: New TPJ report finds that most of Governor Rick Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund projects failed to deliver on their 2010 job promises:

"A summary that Governor Perry’s office published in August suggests that $440 million in taxpayer TEF grants have created 59,600 Texas jobs. Perry claimed in an October presidential debate that TEF has produced 54,600 jobs. Putting aside five TEF projects that make fraudulent job claims and a sixth project that appears to be undergoing an audit, TPJ found evidence that TEF had created 22,349 jobs by the end of 2010. That number amounts to 37 percent of the job claims made by the Governor’s Office."

Here's the full report from Texans for Public Justice.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Perry.