Happy New Year! That’s what most of us texted our loved ones as we celebrated 2019. I did it from my iPhone. But did you ever consider what’s inside your phone? Where it was produced? CNBC recently posted a video of the supply chain for an iPhone. I was amazed to learn that the phone...
The Texas Public Policy Foundation writes to support Representative James White’s November 27, 2018 request (RQ-0258-KP) seeking your office’s opinion on the elements, factors, or standards courts have considered and applied when balancing the rights of the state against the fundamental right of parents to raise their children free from government intrusion. In light of...
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its December jobs report Friday morning, showing nonfarm employment was up by 312,000, stronger than analysts expected. The impressive jobs number, along with the Fed signaling patience on rate hikes, shook the stock market loose from its doldrums, with the Dow posting a 747-point gain. With the December...
Apple, the world’s most valuable company, recently announced a $1 billion deal to build its second corporate campus in Austin to initially include 5,000 employees. This deal comes at a cost to taxpayers statewide of a $25 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund and locally of a 65 percent property tax break annually for...
In announcing the United State’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement last year, President Donald Trump declared, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” A company called RadicalMedia and Bloomberg Philanthropies attempted to counter the president this week with the release of a documentary titled “Paris to Pittsburgh” on the National...
The truth is that the ACA is broken and has been from the start. The federal judge in Fort Worth who recently entered final judgment finding the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional now paves the way for the case to move to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And as the attorney who argued the case on behalf...
When a federal judge recently ruled that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, many in the media were caught off guard. Little attention had been paid to the case, which was brought by the attorneys general of 20 states and by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (representing individual clients who have been harmed by Obamacare)....
Who owns the trees on your property? That’s the question at the heart of a pair of lawsuits in Michigan. The township of Canton, Michigan makes it a crime to remove any tree (defined as anything with a 3-inch wooded stem) without a permit. But under the Township’s tree ordinance, the township will not grant...
The dusky gopher frog is a critter that can be found in certain areas of Mississippi — and nowhere else. Yet the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to “protect” the dusky gopher frog by using the Endangered Species Act to designate a 1,500-acre tract of private forestry land in Louisiana as “critical habitat necessary...
In 2011, then-Texas Governor Rick Perry called on the Lone Star State’s public four-year universities to craft affordable bachelor’s degrees, what the Governor labeled at the time, “$10,000 degrees.” Texas universities have risen to the challenge. In late 2013, the first Texas Affordable Baccalaureate Degree was launched by Texas A&M-Commerce and South Texas College. The...
The Founding Fathers included the Eighth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution to ensure the Federal Government does not perform “cruel and unusual punishment” on U.S. citizens or force them to pay “excessive fines” or bail. Fast forward a couple of centuries: problems that concern this rather vague (but important) clause are rearing their ugly head....
The historic passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act a year ago set off a surge of hiring across America. Since then, private employers added some 2.4 million employees through November 2018, according to the employment reportreleased by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics today. Further, the federal state jobs report shows that low-tax...