May 22, 1985

The way things are going in Texas, college students at state schools will soon see their tuition triple, professional wrestlers will pay $15 instead of $10 for their licenses and paroled convicts will have to pay the state $10 a month to supervise their parole. These are the lengths to which the Texas Legislature is going to balance the state's budget in the face of continued recession in the petroleum industry, which has long been the state's main source of revenue and has given Texans a kind of free lunch as far as taxes go. It is the stark irony of this spring of 1985 that Texas, whose once-booming economy has been dampened by falling world oil prices, is struggling to make ends meet at a time when once-distressed Northern industrial states like New York and New Jersey are suddenly enjoying comfortably balanced budgets and even cutting taxes. 'Paying for Sins We Committed' ''We are paying for the sins we committed in the last 10 years when we had an abundance of revenue,'' said Gib Lewis, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. Because the state never expected the oil and gas revenue to fall, he said, it did not ''save for a rainy day.''

THIS is the beginning of the summer wine season. What exactly is a summer wine? It has a lot to do with wide green lawns; the thwock of tennis balls; white slacks and cotton dresses, and Chinese lanterns along the edge of a moonlit lake. It is not a product, summer wine - it is a romantic idea, gauzy and delicate and probably, at its best, not exposed to harsh reality. In fact, more than a few cynics say the best summer wine is beer. White and rose wines are commonly thought of as summer wines. It is understandable. In the bottle or in the glass, they look more like lemonade or raspberry soda than wine. And because they are less complex than red wine - they have almost no tannin, for one thing - they go down easily. But beware: the alcohol content can readily match that of the big reds.

The growth of the nation's economy all but stopped during the first three months of this year after nearly two years of vigorous expansion, the Commerce Department reported today. It said the gross national product, undermined primarily by the effects of the strong dollar, grew at a rate of only seven-tenths of 1 percent in the quarter, barely half the already slow pace of the Government's preliminary estimate last month. At the same time, the Labor Department said the Consumer Price Index rose four-tenths of 1 percent in April, a moderate increase that was not enough to worry economists. [Page D13.] The Reagan Administration and private economists were inclined to label today's report the epitaph of an erratic deceleration of the economy that began late last summer, rather than a signal of worse to come.

The Reagan Administration today offered a compromise on the MX missile that would temporarily limit deployment to 50 weapons. That offer, in response to a rising chorus of complaints about the huge missile, is exactly half of the Administration's original plan: to house 100 missiles in existing silos on the Western plains. In effect, the Administration has conceded defeat, at least for now, in its efforts to field a full MX force. But the White House wants to leave open the possibility of requesting more missiles in the future, in case arms control talks break down and tensions rise with the Soviet Union.

A prominent New York lawyer gave Alfred E. Smith more than $400,000 in cash and stock options while Smith was Governor of New York in the 1920's, according to a chapter dropped from the lawyer's recently published autobiography. The lawyer, Thomas L. Chadbourne, a millionaire active in Democratic Party politics, wrote in 1928 that he gave Smith the money - at a time when the Governor's salary was $10,000 a year - to encourage him to remain in public life, not to exact favors. Mr. Chadbourne's memoirs, which had been in private hands since well before his death in 1938, were put out earlier this year by New York University Law School. But the Smith material was left out after objections from the law firm bearing Mr. Chadbourne's name - Chadbourne, Parke, Whiteside & Wolff of New York. A copy of the omitted material was obtained by The New York Times.