The Fraser Institute is out with its new yearly assessment of Economic Freedom in North America. Fraser, based in British Columbia, Canada, ranks both nations and states internationally and in North America for their economic freedom, measuring factors such as tax rates, government spending, and labor laws. Fraser found that the top five states for economic freedom...
Direct Primary Care (DPC) is not really a new model for health care in Texas. Long before employer-based insurance (with the safety nets for the elderly and disabled, Medicare and Medicaid) became the standard, patients paid doctors for their care. There were no middlemen—only the patient and the physician, and they made the decisions. DPC...
An article appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Nov. 3—and was reprinted on the front page of the Nov. 8 Austin-American Statesman business section—with the title “Can clean energy plug hole in Texas oil patch?”. This article made us stop and think about some of terminology mistakes we make when we talk about energy....
The question I’m asked repeatedly now is what it all means. Vice President Joe Biden is projected to be the next president of the United States. President Donald Trump has not yet conceded; indeed, legal challenges are just getting underway in several states. We don’t know how those will play out. If I were to offer a simple observation,...
Shutdowns and stay-at-home orders across Texas due to COVID-19 have spiked unemployment, slowed tax receipts, and forced the permanent closure of 8,900 Texas businesses since March. This, from one of the most dynamic and fast-growing economies in the world. A return to previous success is possible, and necessary, by safely reopening Texas and promptly strengthening...
To say we are confused in November 2020 is an understatement. But we have it within our power to ensure all votes are counted, even if recounts are needed. As of this writing, President Donald Trump appears to have lost his bid for re-election. In the background of that, fact checkers in the media have...
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission recently announced it plans to significantly increase, in some cases quadruple, setback rules limiting where oil and gas can be harvested. Though the regulatory agency claims to be championing public health and safety, its proposed setbacks are completely arbitrary and would all but kill the state’s energy industry...
Despite the hardships many have faced—and continue to face—because of the pandemic, local entities across the state still asked voters on Election Day to approve a bundle of bond propositions totaling approximately $12.8 billion. But just as many individuals and families were forced to trim their budgets, voters told Northwest ISD to do the same....
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit Hispanics particularly hard. The reasons for this range from language barriers to higher rates of comorbidities. Combine this with another disturbing trend—4,200 children in New York alone have lost a parent to COVID-19, putting a quarter of them at risk of going into foster care—and a crisis is becoming clear....
When police encountered George Floyd, they unknowingly met someone who had lost his restaurant job amid a pandemic-triggered shutdown and suffered from many preexisting medical conditions. We don’t know if Floyd would have survived the arrest if he were perfectly healthy, but we know that being poor is a disadvantage in the justice system and that incarceration exacerbates health...
Election results in Texas and other states carry an important lesson that will impact U.S. elections for many years to come: the prediction that Democrats will benefit from the growing diversity of our population is flat-out wrong. The White percentage of the U.S. population has been shrinking for years and will continue to do so, demographers tell...
Ronald Reagan once said, “Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.” But as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, local governments seem to have forgotten this principle. At the beginning of the pandemic, the implementation of new rules and restrictions, like social distancing guidelines, advanced a meaningful public health objective. But after...