Republican Rick Perry, 61, of Texas is the longest-serving U.S. governor, having won three elections to lead the second-most-populous state. Perry replaced George W. Bush when Bush won the presidency in 2000. Perry suspended his bid on January 19 and endorsed Newt Gingrich.
A Democrat when first elected to public office as a state representative in 1984, Perry became a Republican in 1989 and won the race for lieutenant governor in 1998. He was elected governor in 2002, 2006 and 2010.
An advocate of limited government, Perry has opposed the introduction of an income tax. He is the only Texas governor since World War II to sign budgets that cut general-fund spending from the previous biennium. He supported an increase in levies on business to offset lower property taxes, a change that has strained state revenue as companies found ways to avoid the extra expense.
Perry backed a bill capping medical-malpractice awards, and after it passed the number of doctors seeking Texas licenses rose. He helped build Republican dominance in the statehouse and engineered the redesign of congressional districts following the 2000 Census. That led to the state delegation’s first Republican majority in more than a century.
James Richard Perry is from Paint Creek, Texas, about 60 miles north of Abilene. His childhood home lacked running water. Perry went to local schools and Texas A&M University in College Station, where he majored in animal science.
An Eagle Scout, he joined the U.S. Air Force in 1972, serving as a C-130 pilot and leaving four years later as a captain. He returned to the family cotton farm in Haskell County.
Rick Perry News
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Texas Governor Rick Perry suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
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Texas Governor Rick Perry lost a bid to stop Virginia from printing ballots for the Republican presidential primary without his name on them.
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Turkey's government condemned Republican presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry for saying the country is ruled by "Islamic terrorists" and should possibly be kicked out of NATO.
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A documentary Newt Gingrich's allies plan to air highlighting jobs lost after takeovers by Mitt Romney's investment firm was created by a veteran Republican strategist who says his goal is to make the former Massachusetts governor a better candidate.
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Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is receiving a Texas pension of more than $92,000 a year in addition to his almost $133,000 salary as governor, according to a financial disclosure statement .
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Texas Governor Rick Perry asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay the state’s Congressional primary elections until a dispute over the composition of new electoral districts is resolved.
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Students at elementary schools in Amarillo, Texas, don't get drawing lessons as a five-year-old finance plan from Republicans led by Governor Rick Perry hasn't delivered funding needed to avoid cuts and improve education.
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Republican Rick Perry used a speech in Iowa today to call for a streamlined federal government, term limits for federal judges and a “part-time” Congress with smaller pay and office budgets.
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Rick Perry's verbal misstep joins a long history of gaffes during televised debates that have become a central and unforgiving element of modern American presidential campaigns.
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Rick Perry's 20 percent flat-tax plan avoids one the pitfalls of similar single- rate proposals by protecting any filers from a guaranteed tax increase. In the process, it retains some tax complexity and ensures federal revenue collections will fall.
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The way Karl Rove saw it in 1989, Rick Perry made the perfect candidate to go far in Texas. There was one problem: Perry was a Democrat.
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Texas Governor Rick Perry’s campaign coffers and the Republican Governors Association that he once headed collected $7 million from companies such as Hewlett- Packard Co. and General Electric Co. that received taxpayer subsidies from a state job-creation fund, a new report says.
Opinion from Bloomberg View
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At first glance, Governor Rick Perry's plan for a federal flat tax seems way cool. I'd love to stop wasting four days a year preparing my return.
Problem is, the attractions of Perry's plan come with a big downside: We'd be ripping off our own children.
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Texas Governor Rick Perry's tax plan is an attempt to solve a problem that no Republican has yet overcome: how to make a flat tax politically palatable. The result he came up with is a proposal that is neither flat nor attractive.
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At the Republican presidential debate last night, Texas Governor Rick Perry twice referred to Herman Cain, the only black candidate on the Las Vegas stage, as "brother." That raised a lot of eyebrows and burned up the social media channels.
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With each succeeding debate flop, the primary season seems to be speeding past Rick Perry.
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The most indelible moment of the recent Republican debates--even more unnerving than the crowd booing a gay soldier or the eruption of scattered applause in appreciation of the free market ushering a hypothetical patient to his death for lack of insurance--was Texas Governor Rick Perry’s execution answer.
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The last contender to enter the Republican presidential race is on track to be the first in fundraising.
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...The increasingly sharp campaign- trail exchanges between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry about Social Security reflect a long-running division among Republicans about the program.
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Let’s give Perry the benefit of the doubt, and ascribe his Fed rhetoric to the passions of a new campaign. Does the underlying sentiment reveal anything important about the governor’s grasp of monetary policy? Or his political strategy? Unfortunately, yes--and the two are related.
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You wouldn’t think that the governor of Texas, the most conservative of the viable candidates in the Republican presidential field, would want to make the U.S. more like Europe. Unless, of course, you have read Rick Perry’s book.
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To get a sense of what a Perry presidential campaign might be like, his appearance last weekend at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Houston is instructive. The event offered high- tech visuals, thumping Christian rock music, country singers and plenty of old-time religion.
Presidential Campaign News
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Updated 29 minutes ago
They drive trucks. They wait on tables. Some still have factory jobs. And they likely will determine which Republican presidential candidate walks away with one of Super Tuesday’s biggest prizes.
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Updated 22 minutes ago
U.S. companies led by General Electric Co. and Pfizer Inc. stockpiled an additional $187 billion in untaxed overseas profits over the past year, boosting their offshore holdings by 18.4 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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Updated 1 hour, 28 minutes ago
After Eliot Engel and Jerrold Nadler, two Democratic congressmen from New York, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem last month, Engel’s wife summed it up:
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Updated 1 hour, 20 minutes ago
U.S. food-stamp use, which Republicans have cited as evidence of a failing economy, rose 0.5 percent to a record in December, the government said.
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Updated 57 minutes ago
Mitt Romney is pressing to refocus the Republican presidential race on jobs and the economy in the sprint to potentially pivotal Super Tuesday contests next week, looking to blunt rival Rick Santorum’s bid to sow doubts about his record on social issues.
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Republicans who blame party rules for a protracted primary race may be mistaken.
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Chris Christie, New Jersey’s first- term Republican governor, said he’d consider a request from Mitt Romney to become his vice presidential running mate, if the former chief executive of Massachusetts were to ask.
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President Barack Obama said his Republican critics are “licking their chops” at the prospect of rising gasoline prices as higher energy costs threaten to crimp the economic recovery.
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Every year around late February, the government puts out the Economic Report of the President, which includes a whole bunch of historical charts on the state of the economy that you can download as Excel spreadsheets. Most years I combine them all into one big spreadsheet and try to draw some conclusions.
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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke defended the central bank’s expansive monetary policy, telling a Senate hearing that it helped create jobs and stabilize prices.
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