The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the nation and world together, but it is also highlighting some inequalities. As our nation is unleashing trillions of dollars in aid to fight the outbreak — and to save the economy — we must not make those inequalities worse. Contrast the tax code with the higher education portions of...
With many families still recovering from Hurricane Harvey, Houston’s leaders are deflecting responsibility for their poor flood control and disaster planning, and they’re pointing fingers at fossil fuels instead. Shamefully using the disaster as political leverage, Mayor Turner on April 22 released his Climate Action Plan (CAP), a mini version of the Paris Agreement, without any...
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a time when many take to social media to celebrate so-called “green” energy and call for broad government support. It’s for the children, after all. But the real numbers show that we have spent tens of billions of dollars on federal energy subsidies with precious little to...
A Harvard law professor argues that home schooling is a form of authoritarian control but believes forcing all children to go to a government-run school is not. I wish this statement was a strawman. But it is not. Elizabeth Bartholet, professor of law at Harvard University, advances this exact argument in an interview in the...
More than 1 million Texans have filled for unemployment since mid-March. There will be many more individuals who will file in the coming weeks. This is a signal that something is very wrong—and it’s a novel virus. But this novel virus has also created a novel recession, and we can’t prepare to treat it with the same...
Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, claims that “Texas Republicans have made coronavirus fallout worse by fighting Medicaid expansion.” “They didn’t create the global health crisis, but they’ve undoubtedly exacerbated its effects,” he writes. But is that true? Had Texas expanded Medicaid when the Affordable Care Act was passed a decade ago, would...
John Koufos, National Director of Reentry Initiatives for Right On Crime, recently testified before the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice on effective reentry strategies for those rejoining society from incarceration. United States Attorney General William Barr established the commission earlier this year, per the President’s executive order, to explore modern...
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed major flaws in our nation’s child welfare system. Across the country, in-person visits between parents and children were cancelled, reunifications of families were postponed, and children entered care with nowhere to go as foster families had second thoughts about taking in a child who may have been exposed to the virus. As a...
This Earth Day, the pollution reduction caused by the coronavirus pandemic is nothing to celebrate. Some radical environmentalists are glorifying the suffering and death caused by the pandemic, calling the coronavirus the “cure” for what plagues the planet — us. Even Pope Francis suggested the virus might be nature’s attempt to strike back at humanity: “Nature never...
After he left the presidency of Harvard University, Derek Bok offered this anatomy of the soul of American higher education today: “Universities are like riverboat gamblers and exiled royalty: their desires are never satisfied.” But Harvard Magazine has now upped the ante, going far beyond an insatiable desire for mere money. The May-June 2020 edition of the...
The coronavirus has impacted every single Texan’s life in some way. From local governments extending stay-at-home orders, to children and their parents adjusting to school closures, and to a record number of Texans filing for unemployment assistance, we are living in a time in which we are all collectively frustrated and uneasy about what tomorrow...
Ezekiel Emanuel, adviser to presidential candidate Joe Biden and Obamacare architect, just called for a 12-to-18-month lockdown to battle COVID-19, asking us to abandon our livelihoods, religious services, and “contact with friends and extended family.” He claims we have “no choice” and that the alternative is hundreds of thousands of deaths. He has also said that COVID-19 is a...