Along with more than $2 trillion in new government spending, President Joe Biden also wants to raise the corporate income tax (CIT) rate from 21% to 28%—that’s a 33% tax hike on corporations. He also wants to increase the tax on American corporations’ foreign profits to an effective rate of 26.25%—doubling it. More government spending,...
President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “COVID-19 relief” package signed in March (in combination with the $900 billion package signed into law back in December) contains the largest impediment to employment in modern times, if not in American history. That’s the conclusion I reached along with fellow economists Casey Mulligan and Stephen Moore in a new...
Overview: Free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity. The Tax Code should not pick winners and losers but rather fund limited roles for government. Unfortunately, Chapter 313 property tax abatements do pick winners: Big businesses are favored over small businesses. Businesses that may not be in operation for the long term receive long-term tax...
Most of our cities saw a dramatic rise in crime last year that appears unabated this year. Is the “defund the police” movement to blame? After all, some of the cities with the worst spikes have adopted that philosophy and made cuts to their police departments. The answer is more complicated than that, but that...
The looming “eviction crisis” represents a dismal failure of government at nearly every level. The Centers for Disease Controls set renters and landlords alike up for failure when it imposed an unconstitutional eviction moratorium as a way to slow the spread of COVID-19 that has now been declared unlawful by federal courts in Texas, Ohio,...
I love Major League baseball. And not just Major League. I’ve stopped to watch High School and even Little League games in the hope of identifying the next Mike Trout. I’ve subscribed to MLB for years so that I could follow my beloved White Sox even after moving away from Chicago. I even watched all...
If regulations proved unnecessary during the COVID-19 pandemic, were they ever really necessary at all? That’s the thought behind a growing push to eliminate unnecessary and even harmful rules that were set aside during the last year. “Across the country, state and local governments have temporarily eased hundreds of regulations during the pandemic, aiming to...
Three campfires in one evening sounds like an awful lot of fun, unless you are a firefighter like Austin Fire Department Battalion Chief Thayer Smith. In the wee hours of April 2, his unit battled fires at three homeless encampments. What is happening in Austin is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. It threatens the...
There’s a very telling subhead in the Dallas Morning News story on “backlash” to election protection laws: “If bills are viewed as discriminatory, Texas could lose NCAA and professional sporting events.” The Morning News isn’t wrong (about that, at least); it’s not about whether proposals such as Senate Bill 7 actually are discriminatory; it’s about...
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government IS the problem.” – Ronald Reagan If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that constitutional rights and the rule of law are the first casualties when government gets out of control and picks winners and losers in the marketplace. Inevitably, there are unintended...
In 2019, law enforcement seized over $12 million in cash or private property from property owners in the state of Louisiana through a practice called civil asset forfeiture. Upon a showing that the property may have been implicated in a crime in civil court, the seizing agency can then take possession of the proceeds from...
The Texas Education Agency has released its annual superintendent salary update and the new data reveals some eye-popping details. For instance, the highest paid full-time superintendent in Texas makes almost $450,000 in base pay alone. In 2021, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD’s top administrator will pull in $437,018, which is more than the President of the United States...