Last year, city officials spent $150,000 to open “free” public restrooms that are accessible 24 hours a day and include a part-time attendant to “clean and restock the bathroom, enforce a 10-minute limit, as well as track hourly usage.” It’s a whole lot of city spending that looks something like this. Reasoning that this was...
John Gallagher grew up on construction sites. In 1954, his father, a buyer for a Chicago fruit market, and his uncle, a bricklayer, began building modest homes part-time, responding to the region’s post-war housing crunch. “I was at the job sites at six years old, and on my 10th birthday, I started working in the...
The two most-populous states, California and Texas, are home to 67.8 million of America’s 325.7 million residents, some 20.8% of the population. These two big states are alike in many key respects, even while being very different in others. Both states are large in land area and population, blessed with abundant natural resources, and diverse....
States with a lower tax burden, such as Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Texas, created private sector jobs at almost double the rate of their high tax peers in the first nine months of the year, according to new government data. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published its monthly state-level jobs report last Friday, detailing...
We’ve set some pretty high goals for Texas’ budget for the upcoming biennium. And to achieve them, Texas need to overhaul its arcane and opaque budget-making process. On Sept. 25, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Heartland Institute, and 16 other member-groups of the Conservative Texas Budget Coalition held a press conference to introduce its legislative priorities for Texas’ 2019...
The San Francisco Business Times featured a series of articles in mid-October chronicling the “Bay Area exodus” as California’s high housing costs, congestion, the nation’s highest marginal income tax rate, and heavy regulatory burden act to push out all but high-end tech companies. The business journal assembled a handy list of 31 San Francisco-region companies...
Katie Greer is communications manager for the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Right on Crime initiative. Fall: That time of year when Americans race down the aisles to snag all things pumpkin and hunt for perfect Halloween costumes. It’s also that time of year when criminal-justice policy experts poke fun at Chesapeake, Va., for trying to...
The Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, six months into former President Obama’s first term. The economy continued to shed jobs until the following March. Manufacturing was particularly hard hit, with almost 2.3 million manufacturing jobs—some 1 in 6—lost between January 2008 and March 2010. As is the case during recoveries, jobs bounced back,...
Over the 25 years of my work with incarcerated individuals and their families, I have had the great pleasure and honor to run into a number of what I call “reentry warriors.” These people were the early champions of improving reentry for those leaving prison long before reentry became the darling of policies and politics...
The Ector County school district is asking voters for a raise. District officials have called a Tax Ratification Election (TRE) for Nov. 6, which would mean a 13 cents (per $100 in property valuation) tax hike for district homeowners and businesses. Ector County will be taxing its citizens the maximum maintenance and operation tax allowed...
Dallas ISD wants more money, and it’s going to the taxpayers in November to request a tax hike. A tax ratification election on the ballot would authorize a tax rate increase. Other Texas districts, including Frisco, Richardson and Duncanville, will hold TREs on Nov. 6. Great! Taxpayers should have a say in what their taxes will...
On June 1, 2016 at a town hall sponsored by PBS, Eric Cottonham, a steel workers’ union member from Indiana, asked President Barack Obama about manufacturing jobs creation, saying, “All of our jobs have left, or are in the process of leaving.”01:07 In response, Obama noted that some jobs have gone overseas and that “I’ve been trying...