Via TPM, a good question: When we hear about states in financial crisis, how come the Republicans never mention Texas?

But there's one state, which is fairly high up on the list of troubled states that nobody is talking about, and there's a reason for it.

The state is Texas.

This month the state's part-time legislature goes back into session, and the state is starting at potentially a $25 billion deficit on a two-year budget of around $95 billion. That's enormous. And there's not much fat to cut. The whole budget is basically education and healthcare spending. Cutting everything else wouldn't do the trick. And though raising this kind of money would be easy on an economy of $1.2 trillion, the new GOP mega-majority in Congress is firmly against raising any revenue.

So the bi-ennial legislature, which convenes this month, faces some hard cuts. Some in the Texas GDP have advocated dropping Medicaid altogether to save money.

So why haven't we heard more about Texas, one of the most important economy's in America? Well, it's because it doesn't fit the script. It's a pro-business, lean-spending, no-union state. You can't fit it into a nice storyline, so it's ignored.

But if you want to make comparisons between US states and ailing European countries, think of Texas as being like America's Ireland. Ireland was once praised as a model for economic growth: conservatives loved it for its pro-business, anti-tax, low-spending strategy, and hailed it as the way forward for all of Europe. Then it blew up.

This is the sleeper state budget crisis of 2011, and it will be praised for doing great, right up until the moment before it blows up.

I could almost feel bad about picking on poor Ruth Marcus, another overpaid Washington Post columnist, lawyer and true Villager (married to the head of the FTC). After all, she's probably just looking out for her boss, and Amato did just chide her yesterday.

But when you read this petulant hatchet job on Rich Trumka and progressive taxation, I think you'll understand:

This graphic depiction of income inequality is, understandably enough, at the center of Trumka's worldview, a perspective that became clear when he came to lunch last week at The Post. Growing income inequality is troubling. It would be troubling in the absence of a budget crisis. But that does not mean, as Trumka would have it, that the solution to the nation's fiscal woes is always, or only, reducing income inequality.

In short, soaking the rich gets you only so far.

Take, for example, what Trumka calls "the current deficit hysteria" and its cousin, entitlement spending. "We don't have an entitlement problem," Trumka says. "We have a revenue problem." In the world according to Trumka, no benefits need be cut, no retirement ages adjusted. Simply requiring the rich to pay a fairer share would bridge the gap.

I'm all for a more progressive tax code. But consider: The Tax Policy Center examined what it would take to avoid raising taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year while reducing the deficit to 3 percent of the economy by decade's end. The top two rates would have to rise to 72.4 and 76.8 percent, more than double the current level. You don't have to be anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist to think this would be insane.

Amato's right: Ruth isn't one for reading history books, or she would know that in 1945, we had a 94% tax on income over $200,000. And it stayed at over 90% until 1964, when it was lowered to 77%. Of course, Republicans have been hacking away at it since then!

Or ask Trumka about whether the eligibility age for Social Security, now 62 for partial benefits, should be raised. This former coal miner -- and son and grandson of coal miners -- erupts. His father worked 44 years in the mines, suffering from black lung, "and if you had said to my dad, 'You have to work until you're 63,' that would have been a death sentence." Fair enough. Some people may need special protection.

But, an editor asks, gesturing around the gleaming conference table at the middle-aged assembly, what about those who do not work in such punishing occupations and for whom the current system would provide two, maybe three, decades of benefits? "What's wrong with that?" Trumka asks indignantly. "The rest of the world does that!" Yes, and how are things going in Greece?

Fresh from The Post, Trumka told the new fiscal responsibility commission that the best way to fix Social Security would be to raise or eliminate the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security tax.

Again, sounds simple, and raising the cap makes sense -- in isolation. But combined with other taxes on the wealthiest? The Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the cap to cover 90 percent of earnings would raise taxes on the highest earners by 6 percent for those born in the 1960s and by 15 percent for those born in the 2000s. Add that to higher income tax rates and you're talking real money, although that change would fill only about one-third of the shortfall.

Oh, boo frickin' hoo! Why, I can hardly see through my tears. Hey Ruth, the working and middle classes have been carrying the weight for the wealthiest for a while now, and they've been making out like bandits. Are you seriously suggesting that we continue to carry the burden because... well, because you like it that way?

Finally, ask Trumka about whether generous pensions and health benefits promised to public employees remain affordable -- were they ever? -- in light of strapped state budgets. Should public employees be called on to sacrifice? Trumka fairly bursts with outrage: "Were they the ones that caused this crisis? Were they the ones that lost 20 percent of the wealth in this country?"

No, but isn't it hard to defend outsize benefits to public-sector employees when wages elsewhere are stagnant and the unemployment rate is so high? Not to Trumka. "Why is that hard to defend when a guy in a hedge fund made $4.4 billion last year?"

Guys in hedge funds make outrageous sums. Union members -- even public-sector union members -- don't. Trumka's frustration is reasonable. His one-sided, tax-the-rich reflex is not. It is the shortsighted bookend to the no-new-taxes mantra of the ideologues on the other side of this stale, and seemingly stalemated, debate.

Let's get this straight. Because you and your husband (and your bosses) are used to a certain serene lifestyle, it seems only fair that nothing disturbs it. So instead of having the rich finally start to carry a proportionate burden, you offer to split the difference with those so battered by the wealthy in the past ten years?

Really, Ruth. You should be ashamed of yourself.

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It's hitting the fan in California as students protest the grotesque 32% hikes in their college tuition.

Angry students at the Davis, California, branch of the University of California refused to vacate the school's administration building Thursday evening in a show of defiance and protest over a 32-percent undergraduate tuition hike instituted by the California Board of Regents earlier in the day.

About 50 students remained in the building, which was supposed to close by 5 p.m. PT (8 p.m. ET), UC Davis spokeswoman Claudia Morain told CNN. At one point, as many as 150 students were at the building protesting the tuition increase, she said. She said she hopes campus police can resolve the issue without the need to make arrests.

CNN affiliate KCRA captured footage of students outside the building shouting, "Who's university? Our university!"

Nearly 400 miles south and hours earlier, hundreds of students marched and chanted against the increase while outside the UCLA building in Los Angeles where regents met to vote on the hike.

Protesting students and others say the increased tuition will hurt working and middle-class students who benefit from state-funded education. But officials argue that a fee increase and deep cuts in school spending are necessary because of a persistent budget crisis that has forced reductions across California's state government.

California is in bad shape and it's only to get worse.

Hullabloo:

And there's no end in sight:

In what's become a depressingly familiar story over the last 2 years, California faces another big budget deficit:

Less than four months after California leaders stitched together a patchwork budget, a projected deficit of nearly $21 billion already looms, according to a report to be released Wednesday by the state's chief budget analyst.

The new figure -- the nonpartisan analyst's first projection for the coming budget year -- threatens to send Sacramento back into budgetary gridlock and force more across-the-board cuts in state programs.

As the article points out, the deficit for 2009-10 (current fiscal year) is $6.3 billion, and the projected deficit for 2010-11 is $14.4 billion. Arnold is already talking about closing it with cuts...

It's astounding to me, that California voters still remain so largely uninformed (or indifferent) about the root causes of the state's yearly fiscal crisis. Those who want to change things have an uphill battle:

Reporting from Sacramento - Backers of an overhaul of California's government, who hope to leverage disgust with Sacramento into support for changing how the state raises taxes and spends money, have a difficult path ahead, according to a new poll of California voters.

Major segments of the electorate see the state's problems as the product of unrestrained lawmakers driven by special interests to waste taxpayer money, and reject arguments that structural issues with the state's Constitution and government institutions are to blame.

Voters don't want the tax code overhauled in the ways that many fiscal experts promise would tamp down the wild revenue swings that have led to a constant state of budget crisis in California. They don't want the Constitution changed to allow a simple majority of lawmakers to push a budget onto the governor's desk, as most other large states allow. And they don't want the state to touch Proposition 13 property tax restrictions, even if residential property taxes would remain strictly limited.

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This is pretty big news, guys. Remember, the Massachusetts plan is the model they want to use for national reform - and already it's beginning to crack under the economic strain.

This is what happens with "bipartisan," market-friendly compromise: Band-aid solutions that can't handle a massive load. And it's exactly why we need single-payer universal healthcare: because it's the only plan cheap enough to stay solvent through tough times.

Overseers of Massachusetts’ trailblazing healthcare program made their first cuts yesterday, trimming $115 million, or 12 percent, from Commonwealth Care, which subsidizes premiums for needy residents and is the centerpiece of the 2006 law.

The board of the Connector Authority made the cuts as officials confronted two side effects of the recession: the state budget crisis and a surge in enrollment by the recently unemployed.

The largest share of the savings will come from slowing enrollment. An estimated 18,000 poor residents who qualify for full subsidies, but who forget to designate a health plan, will no longer be automatically assigned a plan and enrolled and thus could face delays in getting care.

The board also eliminated dental coverage for the poorest residents enrolled in Commonwealth Care, roughly 92,000 people who currently are the only ones in the program who receive that care. Regulators said that would save $10 million. Dental coverage was retained in the budget approved by lawmakers last week, and now it falls to the governor to decide its fate.

Also hanging in the balance is the health insurance status of 28,000 legal immigrants whose Commonwealth Care coverage was dropped in the budget lawmakers approved for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Governor Deval Patrick has until Monday to decide whether to veto any of that budget, which set aside $116 million less for Commonwealth Care than he proposed.