With high-profile gun violence incidents such as those in Odessa, El Paso, Santa Fe and Sutherland Springs fresh in the minds of Texans, the call for policymakers to “do something” has steadily grown louder. From the expansion of background checks to the regulation of magazines or outright confiscation, everyone seems to have an idea of...
President Trump recently shed light on a little-acknowledged but critical fact: Free-market American ingenuity, not the Paris Agreement, is improving our environment. “The Paris Accord would’ve been a giant transfer of American wealth to foreign nations that are responsible for most of the world’s pollution,” President Trump said at the Shale Insight conference in Pittsburgh....
My friend David was a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed in 2010. The next time the union contract was up, his health insurance premiums, deductibles and copays shot up so much that he and his wife elected to go with Medicare and a supplement, even...
Society cannot incarcerate its way out of the public health crisis that is drug addiction. But in making the possession of drugs a felony rather than a misdemeanor, Kentucky shows a stubborn willingness to continue to try. Meanwhile, the drug addicts incarcerated alongside drug traffickers and violent criminals continue to suffer a health crisis, along...
In my prior piece, “Resistance on the Right: Will Conservatives Ever Come Together on an Article V Convention of the States?” I explained that under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, if two-thirds of the states approve resolutions calling on Congress to hold an amendments convention, Congress has no choice but to obey. I then...
Most Democratic presidential candidates are supporting some version of Medicare for All, a radical proposal to put Washington in complete control of the health-care system. Joe Biden, however, promises to “protect and build on the Affordable Care Act,” the last Washington health-care experiment, which is better known as ObamaCare. Yet ObamaCare largely failed in its...
In 1975, at the height of New York City’s financial crisis, President Ford announced he would deny federal aid to help the city avoid bankruptcy. The Daily News ran an iconic headline the next day: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Today the headline might read: “NEW YORK TO MILLIONAIRES: DROP DEAD.” The latest example of New York’s politicians bitterly...
Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, was on Fox News defending his city’s homeless policies Tuesday during an interview with Bill Hemmer. Last summer, the all-Democratic 10-member Austin City Council voted to lift the city’s ban on sleeping or camping on public property, such as sidewalks and parks – except for City Hall itself. Immediately following the vote, Austin’s...
Everyone likes the idea of fair competition. That’s why everyone supported the 2007 investigation of an N.B.A. referee who knowingly influenced the outcome of professional basketball games on which he or his associates had placed bets. There was an outcry by the players, the owners, the league, and the fans — because the idea of picking winners...
Texas Voters Approve Billions in New Debt On Tuesday, voters approved an overwhelming majority of the $9 billion-plus in new debt pitched by cities, counties, school districts, and special districts, according to the Texas Comptroller’s Bond Election Roundup website. Here’s how the top 10 largest new debt proposals fared and a few observations to boot....
In “Can You Still #Resist When Your State’s On Fire? A postcard from the Californiapocalypse,” Amy Wilentz, a journalist, writer, and English professor at the University of California, Irvine, details for The New York Times a truthy series of myths about California’s fiery, electric-less travails. She establishes her credentials at the onset by letting her...
“Two days. Two reports citing the same data. Two different conclusions.” That is how Rick Seltzer described the near-simultaneous release of two studies looking at state funding in Inside Higher Ed. The first study was written by myself for the Texas Public Policy Foundation and found that state disinvestment is a myth. The second study, by Michael Mitchell, Michael Leachman, and...