Rick Perry begins his apology tour (via Igor Volsky):
A few hours after unveiling his campaign for president, Perry began walking back from one of the most controversial decisions of his more-than-10-year reign as Texas governor. Speaking to voters at a backyard party in New Hampshire, Perry said he was ill-informed when he issued his executive order, in February 2007, mandating the HPV vaccine for all girls entering sixth grade, unless their parents completed a conscientious-objection affidavit form.
As Volsky shows, Perry claimed on multiple occasions that he believed that the order was the right thing over the last four years. Suddenly, the decision he has defended all this time has become an “ill-informed” one. In fact, as Reihan notes in his discussion of Perry’s record here, Perry’s original decision was an ill-informed one:
Mann doesn’t even mention the fact that many public health advocates considered Perry’s decision to mandate Gardasil unwise, as the vaccine had only recently been deemed safe enough for widespread use.
That suggests that Perry’s original paternalistic decision, which he regularly defended for years, was a blunder, but it has only been because of the new scrutiny he faces as a presidential candidate that he was willing to admit as much publicly.
A more serious policy blunder, and one that has had significant consequences for Texas’ budget, is the misguided “business-margins tax,” which taxes the gross income of businesses rather than taxing just profits as the old franchise tax did. Reihan quotes from an article in The Texas Observer:
The idea was to cut property taxes and replace the lost revenue with a new business tax.
This 2006 tax “swap” was the one instance during Perry’s decade as governor when he proposed a wide-ranging plan and successfully pushed it through the Legislature mostly unchanged. It’s perhaps his signature legislative accomplishment.
Problem is, it’s been a disaster. Small businesses don’t like it. Some conservatives hate it—in fact, a few believe Perry’s business tax is unconstitutional. Worst of all, the tax doesn’t generate enough revenue. The tax swap has cost the state $5 billion a year for five years running. The Texas budget now faces an ongoing structural deficit because of the underperforming business tax.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses denounced the tax as a failure earlier this year:
“We look at the tax as an abject failure,” said Hoke, “because it’s crippling the small and mid-sized businesses without bringing in what (the legislators) thought. It’s a lose-lose scenario.”
How much of a difference has the change in tax law made to small businesses? According to the NFIB communications director, quite a lot:
And although some have had increases of only $200 or so, “Most companies have seen a 100-500 percent increase,” she reported.
Yes, Perry certainly sounds like the natural candidate to address mounting federal debt and tax reform.
Update: Peter Suderman explains how Perry has been papering over the structural deficit his failed tax law has created. Last year, he used $6 billion in stimulus funding to make up almost the entire deficit, and he has resorted to Pawlenty-esque budget gimmicks in other years:
According to a report by ABC News, Perry’s budget also closed a big part of its budget gap by delaying a $2.3 billion education payment a single day. Thanks to that one-day delay, the payment will fall into the next budget year, and therefore will not technically affect the current year’s budget.
tbraton 
KXB 
el_longhorn 
Please continue to write about Perry’s record in Texas. In areas where he had some direct control or influence – transportation, education, health and human services, criminal justice – his years as governor have been an unmitigated disaster. Luckily for him, the Texas economy has benefited greatly from population growth, NAFTA, and energy demand during his tenure. Those factors have buoyed the Texas economy.
He ordered the vaccine be required when he did not have the authority to do so under the Texas Constitution – a huge slap in the face to the Legislature. And given the fact that the vaccine only worked on only 70% of the strains of virus that cause genital warts and cervical cancer, few public health advocates considered it a good use of scarce government dollars. The only reason most people could think of as to why he ordered the vaccine administered was because his former chief of staff was the lobbyist for the vaccine maker.
The margins tax is horrific. Instituting a state income tax would have been politically difficult, but administratively easy. Everyone already pays federal income tax and knows how to calculate it. But no. We decided to create an entirely new tax based on a calculation that had no relation to reality and that had very different impacts on companies depending on what type of business you were in. Some costs could be deducted from your revenues, some could not. It was pretty arbitrary. Not only did companies have to pay the cost of the tax, they had to pay their accountant extra to figure the damn thing out. And at the end of the day, it did not collect anywhere near the revenue it should have. The result is a state that was fiscally strong has now become another California. We now pay for everything with bonds that are payable from future revenues – universities, transportation, cancer research. If it’s worth selling bonds for, shouldn’t it be worth raising taxes for? The future does not look bright as far as the fundamentals of state government finances go.
And Perry’s indifference to the guilt or innocence of people in the criminal justice system is legendary. He has fought virtually every reform designed to help distinguish the guilty from the innocent. I am not talking about controversial stuff. I am talking about basic forensic science and good police techniques.
The only good thing I can say about him is that he has handled the natural disasters that have hit the state well. And I worked in the Texas Legislature and state government for 5 years under Perry – I know him and his accomplishments very, very well.