The Production Tax Credit (PTC) “is an inflation-adjusted per-kilowatt-hour (kWh) tax credit for electricity generated by qualified energy resources and sold by the taxpayer to an unrelated person during the taxable year.” Originally conceived and passed into law as a short-term measure in 1992 in order to grow the nascent American wind energy industry by...
Conflation is a commonly used rhetorical ploy: combining two things that don’t belong together or using one word to imply another when they don’t exactly mean the same thing. When the Affordable Care Act was pushed through Congress, advocates conflated health care with health insurance. The act was intended to reform health insurance, not health care. And...
Property rights are paramount. That’s one of the key takeaways from a new Texas Supreme Court decision involving short-term rentals (STRs). In Tarr vs. Timberwood Park Owners Association Inc., the high court ruled in favor of Kenneth Tarr, a San Antonio-area homeowner-turned-STR-owner whose plan to earn a little extra money landed him in hot water...
More than 100 people shuffled into a warm room at the Comanche Community Center last week, on June 18th. These rural Texans gathered to tell stories of the real-life impacts of wind development—the side that is often unheard. “There is flicker and there is noise,” one gentleman recounted, echoing numerous comments about the hours of...
Gasoline prices have been rising recently as tensions heighten in the global oil market. These increases may soon be exacerbated if some advocates of a carbon tax get their way. With its flawed assumptions and high costs, politicians should ignore the hype and just say no to a carbon tax. It is expensive and ineffective,...
Owning a home is a cornerstone of the American dream. Homeownership can feel extremely freeing and fulfilling — until it’s not. In the sleepy suburb of Doraville, Georgia, homeowner Hilda Brucker received a call out of the blue from the municipal court threatening her with a failure to appear violation. She had never received a ticket...
A recent United Nations report blasting President Trump and America in general for harboring “contempt” and “hatred for the poor” is based on highly inaccurate data that can’t easily be used to compare the U.S. to other nations. The U.N. report’s main contentions read like an attack on the Trump administration by the Democratic Party: America has...
Multifamily developers are seeing their costs increase as a result of government regulation. According to a new study from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), federal, state, and local regulations account for 32.1 percent of the cost of a multifamily development The study highlights the fact that...
Texas student reading and math results are lackluster and declining according to the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) (annual assessment given to all third-to-eighth-graders in reading and math), 55 percent of Texas third-graders are reading below grade level; 52 percent of Texas third-graders are doing math below grade level; and 51 percent of Texas eighth-graders are reading below grade level.
The story of the shale revolution is not just the scuttled claims that we’re running out of energy resources. It is also an important lesson about American exceptionalism and the conditions that made this breakthrough possible. The shale revolution likely could not have emerged and resiliently endured in any country other than the U.S. The...
Too bad legislators can’t simply pass a law saying, “Stop it!” To grow is a natural law of government. Legal barriers to government growth are circumvented. Instead of complying with statutes designed to protect taxpayers from poor financial decisions, local government officials often seek workarounds. Often, the fuel for enlarging government comes in the form...
Wouldn’t you like to pay lower taxes? Well, a recent study by the Mercatus Center shows that Texas could substantially reduce Texans’ tax burden if it cut corporate welfare. The authors of the study used recently released data to show how much each state government burdens people with higher taxes to fund corporate welfare. Texas...