Chuck DeVore is the vice president of national initiatives at the Foundation. He writes about the economy and how energy, tax and regulatory policies influence general prosperity, and he frequently appears on Fox News. He also guides the Foundation’s growing national work in criminal justice reform. He authored the book The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America.
I just got back from another fact-finding trip to our disintegrating southern border, this time in Arizona where I was part of a group that met with scores of elected sheriffs at the Southwest Border Sheriff’s Coalition conference. What I discovered was terrifying. With Biden and Congress refusing to act to secure the border, what can be...
Dredging up old, questionable data to score some election year points, Democrats and their allies in the media are now claiming that Texans pay more in taxes than do Californians—which is surely news to the thousands of families who have fled the Golden State for the Lone Star State (and its lower taxes) in recent...
In Aug. 25, the California Air Resources Board, the state’s air quality regulator, announced a ban on the sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. Less than a week later, a heat wave threatened California with seven days of power shortages. So the state’s grid operator asked electric vehicle owners not to recharge when they...
We heard a lot from Democrats, President Joe Biden, the media, and environmentalists about how great the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will be for climate change. Curiously, it was crickets over the new law’s central claim—that it will reduce inflation. It won’t. But one thing this massive tax-and-spend behemoth will do—aside from unleashing 85,000 new...
Starbucks recently asked the National Labor Relations Board to suspend all pending and ongoing votes to unionize at its U.S. stores due to concerns stemming from mail-in ballots. The franchise’s objections once again raise questions about the credibility of election systems that rely on mail-in ballots. As with coffee companies, how much more with the...
Democrats and their leftist allies are celebrating the U.S. Senate’s passage of the misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act.” Subject to a vote out of the Rules Committee mid-week, it’s expected that H.R. 5376 will be voted on in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday or over the weekend at the latest. The Democrats’ tax and spending bill...
Buyers from the People’s Republic of China purchased $6.1 billion in real estate last year, the most of any foreign buyer. Many of these purchases over the past few years have been of farmland or ranchland near U.S. military bases. Revelations from a groundbreaking exclusive CNN story published on July 23 about telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei installed in...
Amid the first conventional war in Europe since 1945 and China’s massive military buildup — including nuclear weapons — the U.S. military is experiencing a dangerous drop in its warfighting capability. The U.S. Army, the largest service, has only reached 40 percent of its recruiting goal with just more than three months remaining in the fiscal year....
Expecting publicly traded companies to do more than simply return shareholder value — their fiduciary responsibility — is a fairly new development in Western capitalism. The idea that corporate leadership and shareholders should explicitly care about environmental, social, and corporate governance (known as ESG) issues beyond how they might affect the bottom line has been...
While in Tokyo, a reporter asked President Joe Biden if the U.S. would defend Taiwan. The president’s response, “Yes.” When pressed, Biden reiterated, “That’s the commitment we made.” Biden elaborated that, “The idea that (Taiwan) can be taken by force, just taken by force, it’s just not appropriate. It would dislocate the entire region and...
California policymakers wholeheartedly demonstrated they remain wedded to their homelessness narrative—that the sole answer to homelessness is life-long, subsidized housing—despite the fact that this one-size-fits-all policy, called “Housing First,” has epically failed the Golden State and the nation. Pre-COVID-19 data shows California’s experiment with Housing First resulted in a 47.1 percent rise in unsheltered homelessness. But...
Conservative candidates won a bunch of closely watched school board elections in Texas on Saturday. One of the higher-profile losses was suffered by Jim Rice, a member of the Fort Bend Independent School District (ISD) since 2010. He is also the immediate past president of the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) where he has served on...