It often baffles me why so many politicians and CEOs—folks who have fought hard to achieve their positions—exhibit so much fear. The slightest dip in polls or profits seems to drive them into a headlong flight for the safety of big government. Nowhere is this more evident than in the response to renewable energy subsidies....
Citing a report from Hired, a job site, the Austin Business Journal ran an article headlined, “Study: When adjusted for cost of living, Austin tech workers make more than San Francisco peers.” The piece observed, “…for the fourth year in a row, Austin tech workers have the highest average salary when adjusted based on cost of living… (with) Austin’s tech workers…...
The Institute for Justice has taken up the cause of doctors in Texas who want to offer their patients affordable medications at the point of care—a practice known as physician dispensing of prescription drugs. As the doctors point out, the Texas ban on physician dispensing is irrational. “As 45 other states have recognized, doctor dispensing...
New wind and solar farms are continuing to be constructed all over Texas. Longroad Energy, a company headquartered in Massachusetts, has recently announced plans to build two new renewable energy plants in Texas, which are both set to be completed in the year 2020. Earlier this month, Longroad Energy signed a 15-year Virtual Power Purchase...
The Texas Legislature is giving Texas school districts approximately $700 more per student in taxpayer money to spend nearly as they wish, along with many other monetary bells and whistles. In House Bill 3, recently signed by Governor Abbott, there is more money for full-day pre-kindergarten, teacher salaries, bilingual education, special needs, and disadvantaged students....
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) and many various versions of “Medicare for All” have something in common: they all want to limit your options: From which doctors you can see to the type of treatment you receive, and the kind of coverage you can get, both our current system and the socialized medicine proposed by the Left...
This month, the Trump administration served as a catalyst for perhaps the largest criminal justice public-private-partnership ever assembled, jobs for formerly incarcerated people as they reenter society. As a former prisoner myself, this initiative is personal to me. When behind bars, no one asked me for money – but nearly everyone asked me for a job. Virtually all of...
Since President Trump signed the big tax cut and reform act in December 2017, the pace of private-sector job creation in the nation’s 27 low-tax states has doubled that of their high-tax peers through May of 2019, according to data released today from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manufacturing job growth is even higher with a 126% job-creation...
Texas is facing another hot summer with record-breaking projections for electricity demand with a supply that is having a hard time keeping up. As the Houston Chronicle reports, “If Texas runs short of electricity, ERCOT expects to import additional power from neighboring states if it’s available and issue emergency alerts to ask consumers to reduce...
On Friday, Pope Francis met with a group of energy and investment executives to make an appeal for carbon pricing and a “radical energy transition” to renewable energy to address the “undeniable reality of the climate crisis.” The meeting is part of a multiyear dialogue organized by the University of Notre Dame and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral...
An underreported news item showing that approvals for U.S. citizenship applications have reached a five-year high proves America isn’t anti-immigrant. Nor was it anti-immigrant at the beginning of my time in Congress when I represented 300 miles of the Texas-Mexico border. In 1994, a Democrat-led commission made many of the same recommendations on immigration reform the Trump administration is now making — and I included...
The Trump administration’s new Affordable Clean Energy rule is a promising move toward refocusing the Environmental Protection Agency on sound science, transparency, and the rule of law, rather than its history of bureaucratic overreach and party politics. In August 2015, when the Obama administration rolled out its Clean Power Plan, the New York Times editorial board...