School district property taxes are massive. In 2019, Texas’ local governments walloped homeowners and businesses with property taxes totaling $67.3 billion, according to a new Texas Comptroller report. Of the total tax levy, school districts, by far, imposed the greatest burden at $36.2 billion or 54% of the whole. By comparison, property taxes levied by...
As Texans are dealing with the aftermath of a harrowing week of blackouts, boil-water notices, and frigid temperatures, the finger-pointing has begun. Many of us, my colleagues in the Legislature included, are looking for someone, or something, to blame — understandably so. But we must move on from searching for a convenient scapegoat to understanding the truth of what happened and finding a solution for the systemic problems that led...
For the past eleven months, we’ve been living under a siege of executive orders. What started as a two-week shutdown to flatten the curve turned into a near-permanent pause, with no end in sight. At least that’s the message local governments have been sending. Since March 2020, local governments throughout the state have issued their...
Astronauts. Ballerinas. Doctors. Firefighters. Oilfield workers? One of these things is not like the others. When children daydream about what they want to be when they grow up, oil and gas jobs rarely make the list — even in Texas, the country’s top energy-producing state. That needs to change for sake of the future of...
The city of Austin recently announced a new homelessness “czar,” a position that had been open for more than one year—the first “czar” lasted only a month. As a first course of action, we hope she will advocate for the reversal of a recent decision by ECHO (Ending Community Homelessness Coalition) to skip a full...
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our routines, but it doesn’t change the laws of economics. Yet it seems government is in the business of doing something when it really should do nothing, such as the recent proposals by President Biden and Congress to spend more and raise the federal minimum wage in the name of...
The Tea Party I knew cared about excessive government spending and unfettered illegal immigration. In the era of Trump, border security was rightfully prioritized, but running up the national debt and printing historic amounts of money became a means to an end. Under Biden, the federal government will throw the southern border wide open and...
Elections are a state matter—not a federal one. The 10th Amendment to our U.S. Constitution wisely states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Elections fall under this, as was made even more clear...
As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse? But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only...
“The crisis has already begun,” former U.S. Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan pointed out during the Texas Public Policy Foundation livestream event, “When the Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Coming Border Crisis.” Morgan joined TPPF Senior Fellow in Border Security Josh Jones and TPPF Executive Director Kevin Roberts to discuss the quickly...
When President Biden recently signed executive orders effectively rolling back efforts by the previous administration to reduce the 2019 surge in unlawful crossings at the southern border, he proclaimed, “I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy.” The obvious intent of the declaration was to dispel any suggestion that the newly elected president was trespassing on...
See the second page of ERCOT’s latest reliability assessment. Under the top table describing the reserve margins, they have a table labelled “Range of Potential Risks.” Something between the 4th and 5th columns is what happened this week. Add 2,000 MW of demand above ERCOT’s adjustment here (they assumed a record of 67,200 MW) and 10,000...