ABSTRACT

The Texas political culture highlights independence and individualism and so has little patience with dependency. As with Governor Perry in the quotation above, Texas leaders claim to care about the needy and the afflicted, but they adopt constitutions, pass laws, and allocate funds in a manner that limits actual support for them to a minimum. The tragic consequences of the Texas way regularly come to light, sometimes as a result of official inquiry and action, but more commonly as a result of all too predictable tragedy. To live in Texas is to be subject to a numbing barrage of media reports on underfunded and poorly managed state institutions and programs supposedly designed to serve the poor and the disabled. Texas rarely responds to the needs of the poor and disabled without the intervention of the federal courts and some of these cases go on for decades.