Loyal iPhone users are familiar with ever-rising standards: “bringing incredible speed to everything you do,” costing only a mere $1000, and minus the functionality of a headphone jack or charging port. And many customers do in fact find the faster speeds, higher definition cameras, and longer lasting batteries to be a good enough value add...
“One step—that’s all it would take to be in Mexico right now,” I thought as I stared through an open gate of the Arizona border wall, and seemingly into a different world. Cochise County is a stunning 6,300 square miles with 83 miles of border backed up against Mexico. The mountains are rocky and beautiful,...
Despite what seems like an unrelenting flow of disagreements on political and public policy issues, it is important we come together to solve important problems — especially when it involves the most vulnerable among the next generation. While our organizations, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Texans Care for Children, do not always agree on every policy issue, we do...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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?...