James Quintero is the policy director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Government for the People campaign. Since joining the Foundation in 2008, Quintero has focused extensively on: state & local government spending, taxes, debt, public pension reform, annexation, and local regulations.
The longest government shutdown in American history, 40 days of furloughed feds and finger-pointing, whimpered to an end Sunday night. Eight Senate Democrats, weary of their own party’s lack of a credible path to victory, crossed the aisle to hand Republicans a clean win, invoking cloture on a House funding bill by the slimmest of...
Next month, independent school districts (ISDs) will, again, ask voters to approve massive new borrowing schemes that threaten to unleash a wave of tax hikes and bigger bureaucracies. These fiscal excesses appear widespread too. Taxpayers in nearly 60 different counties will decide on one or more of the 109 individual propositions up for a vote this election cycle, according to the Texas Bond Review Board’s (BRB’s) bond election database. If these measures are entirely successful,...
When I was in college, I passed the César Chávez statue every day on my walk to class at the University of Texas. Now, César Chávez is the name of the road I take to work. For years, Chávez was presented as the figurehead for Mexican Americans, a symbol we were expected to revere. But...