In July, the University of Houston Medical School announced a bold new program—it will open a direct primary care clinic on the campus of Memorial Herman Southwest Hospital. The new DPC facility—aimed at low-income Houston residents—is to be the first in a network of such clinics. Low-income and uninsured Texans stand to benefit from this...
Everyone knows the pandemic hit school finances hard, but districts shouldn’t make COVID-19 the scapegoat for all of their money problems. While the virus certainly has had a fundamental role in precipitating financial hardship, for many districts, much of the woe is of their own making. Up and down the Dallas-Fort Worth area, districts are...
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott just announced that he’ll convene a second special session to begin at noon on Saturday, Aug. 7. The Governor’s call includes 17 separate agenda items, but at least one high-profile item seems to be missing—a ban on local governments using tax dollars to hire lobbyists. The practice is one that’s long...
June’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics comfortably surpassed expectations, with non-farm payrolls increasing by 943,000, compared with an expected increase of 870,000. The unemployment rate fell from 5.9% to 5.4% with the number of unemployed falling by 782,000 to 8.7 million. The Labor Force Participation Rate increased slightly to 61.7%. Highlighted Sectors...
Adoption—it’s a tricky thing to get right. Being an adoptee myself, I speak from experience. Making sure the family and the adoptee are the right fit is everything. But we often forget the process doesn’t end there—especially for the child. Currently in the state of Texas, accessing original birth certificates, records, and contacts from the...
Backed into a corner by circumstances at the border and growing pressure from Congress, the White House on Monday renewed a public health order—Title 42—that allows the Border Patrol to turn migrants back at the border over COVID-19 concerns. That pressure from Congress came in the form of a discharge petition on a bill that...
The prognosticators were wrong again about the nation’s economy in the second quarter, and poor policies explain the disappointment. From April to June, real gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 6.5% at an annualized rate—about one-fourth slower than the 8.4% some expected. In normal times, a 6.5% growth rate would be phenomenal, but these aren’t...
When Texas public school students return to the classroom later this month, the state’s portion of their educating funding will be based on a number of factors, including whether their seat is in their seat. That’s the current model for school funding in Texas—it’s partly determined by the number of minutes that a student is...
In March, my 18-year-old brother fell and broke his nose (in my experience, that’s what little brothers do). He took himself to the emergency room, to see if it was truly broken—and to find out what he should do about it. He got his answer—and a $14,000 hospital bill. Instead of a simple X-ray, he...
President Biden and Congressional Democrats have proposed roughly $6 trillion in new spending over a decade of hard-earned taxpayer dollars. To put this into perspective, this exceeds the economic output of every country except the U.S. and China, matches the $6 trillion authorized for COVID-related items since the pandemic—with nearly $1.5 trillion unspent—and exceeds the...
Texas House Democrats continue their quorum-busting, COVID-19-spreading walkout in Washington, D.C. as they take their public relations disaster to the U.S. House of Representatives Thursday morning in a hearing bearing the ominous title of “Democracy in Danger: The Assault on Voting Rights in Texas.” Texas Democrats fled to D.C. to stall Republican efforts to pass a...
Every dollar the government spends comes from taxpayers. The late economist Milton Friedman said, “The burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.” Taxes should only fund limited government at the least economic harm, which Texas does well by depending mostly on sales taxes—though local property...