Public Safety

Raising age to buy rifles in Texas won’t prevent mass shootings. There’s an obvious reason why

Before the Uvalde school attacker perpetrated obvious felonies such as capital murder and aggravated assault — before he even pulled the trigger — he had already committed numerous crimes. Among them was bringing a firearm on school premises, making a menacing public display of the weapon, and trespassing on school property. Some people think there...

September 22, 2022

Immigration

Biden’s border crisis is out of control. Here’s how local law enforcement can fight back

I just got back from another fact-finding trip to our disintegrating southern border, this time in Arizona where I was part of a group that met with scores of elected sheriffs at the Southwest Border Sheriff’s Coalition conference. What I discovered was terrifying. With Biden and Congress refusing to act to secure the border, what can be...

September 22, 2022

Local Government

Amarill-no

We all expect voters to have the final say in election questions. A solemn acceptance of the votes cast, win or lose, has been the bedrock of American politics since the inception of the nation—to ignore it would be to deny the very essence of democratic governance and embrace a type of tyranny that elevates...

September 16, 2022

K-12 Education

Texas Should Modernize Its K-12 Student Transfer Law

Here’s the bad news: school district boundaries restrict educational opportunities for Texas’s 5.4 million students. Here’s the good news: a handful of common-sense reforms would remove key barriers for families seeking alternative education environments for their kids. That’s the main conclusion of our recent study on the Lone Star State’s student-transfer law, in which we evaluated student-transfer...

September 13, 2022

Taxes & Spending

No, Texans Don’t Pay More Taxes than Californians

Dredging up old, questionable data to score some election year points, Democrats and their allies in the media are now claiming that Texans pay more in taxes than do Californians—which is surely news to the thousands of families who have fled the Golden State for the Lone Star State (and its lower taxes) in recent...

September 12, 2022

Foreign Policy

As America Self-Destructs With Green Energy, China Preps For War With Coal

In Aug. 25, the California Air Resources Board, the state’s air quality regulator, announced a ban on the sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. Less than a week later, a heat wave threatened California with seven days of power shortages. So the state’s grid operator asked electric vehicle owners not to recharge when they...

September 12, 2022

Energy & Environment

Here’s One State That Has The Guts To Burst The Woke Bubble

Investing to support social or political causes is as old as investing itself, but what we now know as Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) investing began in the 1960s as socially responsible investing. In 2005, “Who Cares Wins” stated that “embedding environmental, social and governance factors in capital markets makes good business sense and leads to more sustainable markets and...

September 12, 2022

Taxes & Spending

Corpus Christi governments should adopt the no-new-revenue tax rate

Ronald Reagan once observed that, “Whenever we lower the tax rates, our entire nation is better off.” The Texas version of that statement equates to: Whenever we lower property tax rates to the no-new-revenue level or lower, our entire state is better off. For those not familiar with the term, the no-new-revenue tax rate is...

September 12, 2022

Family

Empowerment Accounts: 21st Century Safety-Net Reform

Frankie Johnson, a college-educated single mother from Washington, D.C., moved to Atlanta to distance herself and daughter from an abusive husband. Without a job or place to live, she sought government assistance for childcare and transitional housing. While she waited for this assistance, she was offered a job paying $70,000. She turned it down. Why?...

September 12, 2022

Foreign Policy

AMLO talks tough on crime—except when referring to narcos

Mexico’s president is pressuring the high court to declare automatic pre-trial detention constitutional, arguing public safety depends on it. Critics say the practice covers for sloppy investigations. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his functionaries have been jawboning the supreme court to uphold the practice of automatic pre-trial detention for a long list of crimes—resorting...

September 7, 2022

Local Government

Gov. Abbott Proposes the Largest Property Tax Cut Ever in Texas

On Wednesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pressed for property tax relief, telling a big crowd in Fairview that he wants to take half of the projected $27 billion state surplus and use it to reduce property taxes. If this happens, it’d make for the largest property tax cut in Texas history. The news is sure...

September 2, 2022

Local Government

It’s the Wrong Time for Tax Hikes

Former President Barack Obama once proclaimed that: “The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of the recession because that would just suck up and take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.” Like a broken clock, he got that one right. Raising taxes...

September 2, 2022