Last week, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar released the Biennial Revenue Estimate 2016-17 that acts as a guidepost for how much revenue the 84th Texas Legislature will have available to appropriate during the 2015 Legislative Session. Given the state’s constitution requires a balanced budget, the report also sets the stage for how much legislators have available...
Former Texas Comptroller Susan Combs released her last report “Path to Stability: ERS at the Crossroads” before leaving office. This report provides valuable information on the Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS), the pension fund for state employees, that includes the following highlights: “Based on ERS’ fiscal 2014 actuarial valuation, if current assumptions hold, the...
This commentary originally appeared in The Federalist on January 6, 2015. Few individuals outside of the music editorial realm consider Rolling Stone a reliable source of journalistic content. In recent years the publication’s rank amateurism has been made patently evident in its coverage of the nation’s criminal justice system. Whether a quixotic exercise in the apologetics of a butcher or whole-cloth fabricationof...
This commentary originally appeared in Forbes on January 13, 2015. A new book by Frank Mussano, former dean of York College of Pennsylvania,and Robert V. Iosue takes on the crisis of tuition hyperinflation. The book’s title conveys its conclusion: College Tuition: Four Decades of Financial Deception. Summarizing their work in a recent article, Mussano and Iosue argue that...
This commentary originally appeared in Dallas Morning News on January 12, 2015. To sustain the Texas model’s economic success, the 84th Texas Legislature should slow the growth of the state’s budget and eliminate the costly business margin tax. Since 2004, Texas’ total budget has increased by 64 percent to $204 billion for the current two-year fiscal period....
Economic development incentives such as tax abatements are often simply presumed to work by their proponents. But the real-life consequences of incentives gone wrong are rarely considered, and yet affect real lives and real families. The study that the Center for Local Governance released today, The Failure of Tax Abatements: Corporate Handouts That Just Don’t...
Richard Florida, from the University of Toronto, had an opinion piece in the New York Times on Sunday, January 4 entitled, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?” In it, Florida makes this initial observation about “red states”: Red state economies based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl may have lower wages, higher poverty...
This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on 3/24/2013. Ten years ago, Texas was known as a “judicial hell hole,” thanks to a torts system that was out of control — and the people who paid the price were the ordinary men, women, and children of the Lone Star State. The story of how that was...
A publication of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
The year 2014 was a discouraging one for American higher education. Over the last twelve months, too many universities have been squandering what has been up until now their greatest source of support—the public’s respect and loyalty. This drop in consumer confidence has been some time in coming. A 2012 national Pew survey finds...
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the last two years have seen a substantive decrease (930,000) in the number of college enrollments nationally. Aside from the rebounding economy — when jobs are scarce, some high-school grads and adult students see college as a more attractive option — at least two factors account for this decline:...