Some folks never miss an opportunity to discount Texas’ prosperity by ascribing the Lone Star State’s good fortune to its oil and gas deposits. A recent example from The New York Times, “Why Texas No Longer Feels Miraculous,” argues that the oil and gas sector boom led to the “Texas Miracle” even as conservative...
You may often wonder how Texas’ business tax climate ranks with other states. Well, the Tax Foundation has an answer in their recently released 2018 State Business Tax Climate Index report rankings all fifty states based on the burdens of each state’s corporate income tax, individual income tax, sales tax, unemployment insurance, and property tax....
The hotel occupancy tax (HOT) is sometimes called a “waste tax” because it can’t be spent on much more than fluff. Here’s another example of that. KXAN launched an investigation recently into money spent by Visit Austin, a private 501(c)6 that markets the city internationally and “receives a substantial portion of its revenue from the...
Criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement is nothing new. In 1992, U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot notoriously implied that if NAFTA passed there would be a “giant sucking sound” as jobs and wealth left the country. Recently, there’s discussion of adding sunset clauses and other measures that could weaken the agreement because...
Austin is vying for Amazon’s impressive new “HQ2” — a second company headquarters that could supercharge the local economy with $5 billion in capital investment and 50,000 new, good-paying jobs. Landing the state-of-the-art campus would be nothing short of blockbuster. While Austin has much to offer and much to gain, it shouldn’t fall into...
Do you have a custom pecan wood table in your house that costs as much as a car? If not, then the city has nicer stuff than you. A new city audit found that, during recent renovations at City Hall, the previous city manager submitted a Purchase Order for “a custom pecan wood table” costing...
A new report from the Austin city auditor confirms what many of us knew already—that construction costs often balloon far beyond their original estimates. The auditor’s review of the Public Works Department, the branch of city government that “designs, manages, and inspects major capital improvement projects,” identified a slew of problems with the city’s construction...
Although the public’s faith in traditional, brick and mortar higher education is dwindling, college tuition prices keep rising. A Pew Research Center national pollfound that 57 percent of prospective college students believe that a college degree no longer offers a value commensurate with the price of tuition and fees. The same poll revealed that 75...
The United States spends more on healthcare than any other country, but it spends it on the wrong people. There are 15.8 million healthcare professionals nationwide, and 95 percent of them are non-doctors. Why? The healthcare system is built for middlemen, not patients and providers. Healthcare middlemen include insurance companies, government administrators, actuaries, billers,...
A conservative think tank with ties to the Trump administration is lobbying the White House to go big when it reconsiders the Obama administration’s signature climate change rule. U.S. EPA is expected to soon announce its plans to repeal the Obama-era Clean Power Plan rule to limit power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions. And the...
There is nothing quite like the power of American ingenuity and innovation. And nowhere in the country is there a better example of economic growth and empowerment on display than right here in Texas. A primary reason for that? Freedom. Specifically, there is simply less government intrusion into the daily lives of families and...
A few years back, children’s book author Kari Anne Roy was visited by both the Austin police and Child Protective Services for allowing her son Isaac, then 6, to do the unthinkable: play outside, up her street, unsupervised. Though eventually the charges were dropped, it wasn’t before Child Protective Services interviewed all three of...