The Honorable Ron Simmons is a distinguished senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Right on Work initiative. He previously served as the state representative for House District 65 in Denton County from 2013 to 2019.
A pre-pandemic analysis of data from the nation’s 20 largest cities revealed that the number of homeless deaths rose by 77% from 2015 to 2020. The most common causes of death are either preventable or treatable: “drug overdoses, violence, traffic deaths and premature lethality of treatable conditions like heart disease,” according to the analysts. This was...
Late last year, I made my third trip to Bonton Farms in southern Dallas. Each time I leave to go back to my home in the northern suburbs, I feel angry, overwhelmed, sad and encouraged, all at the same time. I’m angry because the public policies put into place over the years on criminal justice...
Since the launch of the federal and state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus, predictably, has been on how governments at all levels have fared in delivering necessary tests, personal protective equipment (PPE) and other medical equipment to ameliorate the spread of the disease. But government hasn’t acted alone. Far from it. Behind every...
Imagine if a state enacted a law that wound up banning the use of the latest medical technology during a crisis. Practically speaking, that is what Texas has done in education. In 2013, the state of Texas passed a law prohibiting any new public school districts from offering full-time online education. The law said only...
Texas Democrats have a cure-all for our worries about in-person voting in upcoming elections. They want to expand mail-in balloting to include every Texan. Republicans who point to problems with the plan are said to be trying to suppress the vote, or are callously indifferent. “Voters should not have to choose between their lives or...
The inner-city community of Bonton, near downtown Dallas, is thousands of miles and nearly two centuries removed from the Victorian London of Charles Dickens. But there are some important parallels. If I’m hesitant to cast Daron Babcock, of Bonton Farms, in the role of Scrooge for this re-telling, it’s only because we focus too much...
For Eva Arriaga, the “skilled worker disconnect” was uncomfortably close to home. Though the Houston area economy is booming, the young single mother lacked the skills she needed to take advantage of the shortfall of as many as 8 million welders, plumbers, electricians and other skilled workers that the American workforce would need by 2027. The qualification...