With a little help from the Local & Consent Calendars Committee, the Texas House could be getting ready to help make local elections more transparent. There’s a bill currently pending in committee—Senate Bill 1229—that would require local officials to post a lot more information online. If the bill gets out of committee and is approved...
According to some politicians, climate change hurts minorities the most. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez writes in her Green New Deal that “climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction have exacerbated systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices.” She’s got it backward. In reality, expensive and regressive policies that drive up the cost of energy — and...
Trying to stand out in a crowded field, Democratic candidates for president have so far proposed nine separate tax increase ideas totaling more than $10 trillion. We can break them down into three basic groups. First are tax hikes that hit banks or Wall Street—two interests without a lot of friends. The problem with these is...
TPPF’s Chuck DeVore addressed the Independent Power Producers of New York and spoke about the difference between logic and virtue-signaling. Logic, he said, is about the facts. Virtue-signaling isn’t. Take Georgetown, Texas—the Austin suburb that has pledged to use 100 percent renewable electricity. Its promise achieves all the right political goals, but when the facts...
The Texas Legislature is in the final stages of passing a budget that will determine whether Texans get real property tax relief or whether our property taxes will keep skyrocketing year after year. The good news is that there is a simple solution. If your elected officials commit $2.3 billion from the Senate’s version of...
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Green New Deal — an update to the “Sustainable City Plan” released in April — sets out three broad goal categories: increase the quality of life; reduce pollution that harms people; and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. L.A.’s quality of life challenges are nothing new to any person familiar with the...
When the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia in 1787, foremost among their concerns was addressing the growing tendency among states to tax or inhibit their neighbors’ commercial trade. New York was an especially nettlesome practitioner of economic warfare on adjacent states, placing import duties on New Jersey cabbage and Connecticut firewood...
To protect Obamacare, House Democrats have passed a resolution that will kick hundreds of thousands of Americans off their insurance plans. HR 1010, sponsored by Representative Kathy Castor (D- FL) and cosponsored by 25 members of her party, is a prohibition of short-term limited duration insurance plans that were put in place by the Obama...
Texas policymakers generally understand that Texans do not want bigger government and higher taxes. So they have gotten pretty good over the years at concealing how much of your money they are spending. The textbook example of this occurred in 2013 when policymakers used every trick in the book to hide the fact that they...
In the world of commerce, the market rewards success with profit and punishes mismanagement with bankruptcy. In health care, mismanagement is rewarded. Witness Medicare, which provides medical care for 51.2 million Americans aged 65 years and older, as well as 8.8 million disabled. The latest report about the Medicare Trust indicates that the “depletion date”...
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its April employment report this morning, showing continued robust growth in the job market with 263,000 jobs added in April. The official unemployment rate is now 3.6%, the lowest it has been since 1969. Notably, wages were up 3.2% from a year ago. With inflation remaining tame, real buying power...
Like a parent preparing to discipline unruly children, the Texas Legislature is getting ready to rein in local governments on everything from taxation to regulation to annexation and more. And city officials are none too happy about it. The latest high-profile flare-up came courtesy of Austin Mayor Steve Adler, who used his State of the...