This commentary was originally featured in the Washington Examiner on August 29, 2017. The Affordable Care Act has made health insurance even raise rates an average of 19 percent. To make the situation worse, payment schedules to doctors continue to go down, making care even less accessible. Washington has two drastically different answers to these problems. Congress...
This commentary was originally featured in the Austin American-Statesman on August 27, 2017. The Texas Legislature’s special session may be over, but what happened over the last 30 days will have lasting effects. Perhaps the biggest thing to take place under the pink dome this summer wasn’t the passage of a new law, but rather...
This commentary was originally featured in Forbes on August 24, 2017. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, rolled out in 2009 and updated in 2013, addresses the weaknesses of the Official Poverty Measure. Moreover, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) shows many interesting statistical connections to economic and public policy variables, unlike the Official Poverty...
This commentary was originally featured in The Hill on August 24, 2017. The discussion of raising the debt ceiling before the federal government potentially defaults on September 29 is an excellent opportunity for Congress to demand tax cuts and restraining government spending for pro-growth budget neutrality. Budget neutrality would allow increased economic activity from restraining government while allocating more...
This commentary was originally featured in Real Clear Health on August 24, 2017. After World War II, America faced a severe shortage of primary care. Doctors struggled to meet the rising demand brought on by the baby boom, while the cost of care became increasingly unaffordable. In 1965, the first nurse practitioner training program launched...
This commentary was originally featured in Forbes on August 22, 2017. As the campus culture wars grind on, two new groups have emerged—the hypersensitive and the guilty. Anticipating the first of these, I argued here that, under the tutelage of the campus PC/SJW crowd, sensitivity has been “weaponized.” Much of the media criticism of campus censorship suggests...
This commentary was originally featured in Forbes on August 22, 2017. By the official definition of poverty in America, New Mexico has the nation’s highest poverty rate, 21.8 percent, while New Hampshire has the lowest, 6.6 percent. But a newer, more comprehensive measure of poverty by the U.S. Census Bureau tells a different story, with California having the highest poverty...
American education is at a crossroads. With per pupil spending at record highs, and educational attainment stagnant at best, our return on investment has never been worse.
This commentary was originally featured in the Washington Examiner on August 18, 2017. Substantially higher costs of building nuclear power plants have recently forced Scana Corp. to terminate delayed building of two reactors in South Carolina and Southern Co. to potentially end their project in Georgia. Fewer active nuclear reactors is the current trend in the U.S., from 105 in 2012...
This Letter to the Editor was written in response to the Austin American-Statesman article "Commentary: Tree legislation brings Texas to the edge of anti-localism." The letter was not published by the paper. The accusation that tree legislation in the Legislature would “grant all private property . . . the right to destroy and remove any...
This commentary was originally featured in Forbes on August 15, 2017. Remarking on the relation between education and politics, Joseph Stalin observed that “the writer is the engineer of the human soul.” In Stalinist fashion, today’s campuses are endeavoring to rewrite the souls of engineers. With this latest assault on science and human reason, one begins to...
This commentary was originally featured in the Tyler Morning-Telegraph on August 10, 2017. Texas has had unmatched economic prosperity for much of the last two decades. Limiting the government’s influence in our daily lives supports that growth. That’s why it’s essential in the 85th Legislature’s special session to promote statewide reform by passing a conservative...