Legislators Guide to the Issues 2007-2008

Assessing Tax Trends in the City of Austin

Does history suggest that property taxes are too high in the city of Austin? And, if so, have local decision-makers actively helped or hurt the situation?   To help answer these questions, let’s review the city’s 2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) and gather four types of data—i.e., tax levies, local population, total tax rates, and taxable values—over a 10-year time horizon. Using these audited estimates, we can gauge the growth of government (i.e., tax levy trends), assess its reasonability...

Fool Me Twice: Why the Texas Grid is Still Vulnerable to Winter Storms | Part 3: How Texas Can Solve Its Winter Reliability Problem

Part 3: How Texas Can Solve Its Winter Reliability Problem Five years after Winter Storm Uri, the ERCOT grid is still not ready for the next major winter storm. The first two installments of this series showed that demand has grown more than 20% since 2021 while firm generation capacity has barely budged, and the...

What the Private Sector can Teach the Public Sector about Efficiency

Recently, former President Trump floated the idea of creating “a government efficiency commission a federal commission to audit the entire federal government.” And even better, he suggested putting Elon Musk in charge of the commission, saying he is a great “cost-cutter.” Unleashing a commission of this nature on the federal government, led by a titan...