The fossil fuel follies continue. The environmentalists’ latest publicity campaign is a new name for more of the same: Stop the Money Pipeline, designed to bully banks, investment firms, and insurance providers into cutting ties with energy companies. What the climate activists don’t realize is that divesting from fossil fuels won’t have any meaningful effect...
There’s even an acronym for the way teachers feel about these late winter and early spring months: EDOFMA, the eternal darkness of February, March and April. It’s a time when education seems like an endless slog, with little visible progress. As one blogger puts it, “For the first few weeks back from the holidays in...
The Teacher Retirement System of Texas has a big problem on its hands. A few weeks ago, it was discovered that TRS — the state agency responsible for overseeing teacher pensions — had signed a multi-year lease for luxurious office space in downtown Austin costing more than $326,000 per month. That handsome sum secured 100,000...
How Big is Texas’ Pension Debt? Answer: $86,109,622,354. That’s right, pension debt owed by Texas’ state and local retirement systems grew to more than $86.1 billion in February 2020, according to the Pension Review Board’s latest actuarial valuation report. That’s a marked increase from the previous report (in October 2019) when unfunded liabilities totaled $3.4...
The Dow is down 1,000. Gold is up $30.30 intraday and $101.70 in the past 30 days. And oil is down $2.79 to $50.59, a drop of 5.2%. Are the markets simply in a correction or are they signaling a recession? The market turmoil is linked to the deadly virus outbreak in China, where factories...
Austin home prices are soaring. According to new figures released by the Austin Board of Realtors, the median price for a home inside the city limits rose to an eye-popping $384,750 in January 2020. That’s a year-over-year increase of 13 percent, signaling an incredibly hot market. Source: Austin Board of Realtors But that’s not the...
Civics education in the United States is in a state of crisis, which, if not addressed, will doom our constitutional democracy. If the above assertion sounds unduly apocalyptic, consider these facts: Recent polling of Americans’ civic literacy, conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, should shame all of us involved in education: While 90% of...
Despite the many studies that found problems yet little positive effects from state film incentives, “just an old sweet song” keeps Georgia’s program on our mind. Georgia, we are told, has created tremendous growth for its film industry by offering a very generous tax credit, so much so that it is now called the new...
There’s no end to fun surveys that purport to measure patriotism among the states, with military enlistments often part of the criteria. However, using enlistment rates to gauge the regional willingness to volunteer for the armed forces betrays a common misunderstanding of the way the U.S. military operates. What matters is accessions to the military, not enlistments....
In today’s age, reliable transportation is everything. And in Utah, not only does a car or truck provide convenience and comfort, it’s often a necessity in rural areas and for commuters. Now imagine that a person’s driver’s license is suddenly suspended for no good reason. This would be an incredible inconvenience — and even worse,...
Controversy is brewing in North Texas. At its center is an obscure local government behaving badly and raking in millions at your expense. The entity in question is the North Texas Municipal Water District (NTMWD), an “invisible government” providing water and wastewater services “to more than a million people” in thirteen Metroplex cities. One big...
In South Texas last summer, a Hidalgo school board election was voided after allegations of mail-in ballot fraud. Judge Federico “Fred” Hinojosa Jr., a Democrat, expressed concern that 52 ballots “were cast in violation of the Texas Election Code and should not have been counted.” It doesn’t sound like much, but those 52 votes were enough to...