Fellow Common Sense Texans:

As you know, a major part of our mission is to help inform our members and our fellow Texans with information about their representatives in Washington, Austin and their local areas.  In order to give our fellow Texans more information about the men and women representing them in Austin, we have performed an analysis of certain fiscal responsibility ratings of all 150 members of the State House using information from 4 sources:

Texans for Fiscal Responsibility 2009 Ratings

Heritage Alliance 2009 Economic Ratings

Texans for Fiscal Responsibility 2007 Ratings

Americans for Prosperity-Texas 2007 Ratings

We collected the ratings for each of the 150 members of the Texas State House and averaged the four ratings together for each (where available) in order to generate a 'composite' fiscal responsibility rating for each member.  We then sorted the legislators by their composite fiscal responsibility ratings and plotted them on three graphs:

Fiscal Responsibility Index - All Texas State House Members

 

Fiscal Responsibility Index - Texas State House Members Rated 50% and Above

 

Fiscal Responsibility Index - Texas State House Members Rated Below 50%

NOTE : a higher rating reflects a voting record in favor of fiscal responsibility, while a lower rating reflects a voting record against fiscal responsibility.  A legislator with a rating of 50% is voting against the taxpayers as often as he or she is voting in the taxpayers' interests.

Most of our members already know who represents them in the State House, but if you don't, you can look it up here:

http://www.fyi.legis.state.tx.us/Address.aspx

Please note that these graphs and numbers do not tell you everything you need to know about your state house member, but these ratings should serve as a starting point for learning more about who your state house members are and how they have been voting down in Austin.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.