Comparing HHSC’s cost estimates under the status quo to our reform model, cost-savings could be at least $4 billion dollars per year, increasing to as much as $6 billion per year by 2023.
There is broad consensus that we have passed a point of diminishing returns with respect to incarceration. The more they are used, the less effective prison cells become.
New data from the Bond Review Board (BRB) show that Texas’ local governments have amassed debts totaling more than $338 billion, an increase of just over $5 billion from the last fiscal year. That works out to be roughly $12,250 owed per Texan.
According to the city’s Department of Planning and Community Development, the annual tax bill for a home appraised at $113,800 is expected to grow from $2,342.35 to $2,859.69 simply as a result of being absorbed into the city limits. That’s a tax increase of more than 22 percent! Worst of all, it’s going to be levied on people who have absolutely no say in the process.
In general, healthcare spending under Medicaid is rising at an unsustainable pace. Unless other budget priorities are forfeited, taxpayers may soon have to pay higher taxes.
Thanks to these exports, dominated by oil-related products, they supported more than 1.1 million Texas jobs in 2014, which are about 10 percent of all U.S. export-related jobs.
Despite these economic concerns and the difficulty of estimating economic and fiscal measures for two years in the future, the Comptroller’s certification provides evidence that the Legislature can fund essential government functions within population growth plus inflation and provide substantial tax relief.
The final oral arguments for the current school finance litigation were heard before the Texas Supreme Court on September 1st 2015. This amicus brief explains how our state can make education more productive for Texas children.
More than 1 percent of all U.S. adults are now behind bars, giving the U.S. the distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The newly adopted standard, which has been pending since 2011 when the White House yanked back the rule at a cost of $90 billion annually, joins at least 20 other EPA rules of unprecedented scope, stringency and cost promulgated under the Obama administration.
In Ohio, Medicaid surpassed cost projections by nearly $1.5 billion in the first 18 months after expansion.
The bottom line that few Americans know, given the media’s daily drumbeat of shootings and mayhem, is that violent crime in the U.S. peaked in the early 1990s with the gun homicide rate in particular about half today of what it was a little more than 20 years ago.