As if education dollars weren’t stretched thin enough already with top-heavy bureaucracies and in-school daycares for kids’ kids, the Office of the Texas Attorney General has now prepared a mandatory high school curriculum that will delve into such questions as the difference between “alleged father” and “presumed father.” So while 50 percent of Texas kids entering college need remediation in the core studies, they will at least know how to “secure child support.” The school course is called “PAPA” — Parenting and Paternity Awareness curriculum. Oh, please…

With the state’s new business tax expected to bring in billions of extra dollars, some in Austin are salivating over the prospect of spending all that cash. Not so fast, writes the president of the Texas Association of Business this week. Former state representative Bill Hammond says that “when the actual tax revenue exceeds what lawmakers predicted in the state budget, we have to question if the state should keep the extra dollars to fund frivolous government projects or if the money should be given back to businesses.” His answer: “give it back.”

The Texas Department of Transportation is a high-profile agency that has seemed intent on making a series of high-profile plunders in recent years. No one has much good to say for an agency that so often seems to spend frivolously while claiming poverty. To say TxDOT is in need of reform is a mild understatement. But Texas needs a well-run, properly functioning transportation agency. And the Houston Chronicle‘s profile of the new TxDOT chair, Deirdre Delisi, gives reason for hope that the agency may yet live up to the taxpayers’ expectations and our economy’s needs.

Left-wingers are a grim lot. Not only is the sky falling and the glass half empty, but it’s the lack of funding that makes the sky fall and drains water from the glass. Take the current Texas economy: unlike the rest of the nation, the state has job growth and the economy is performing strongly. But to the state’s liberals, calamity rules because government isn’t taking all that it could from your wallet.

At an interim hearing this week in McAllen, Texas school districts and colleges demanded yet more tax money. The tag team approach may have backfired though, as South Texas College justified their request on the grounds that two-thirds of their students need remedial classes. What does that say about the job the school districts are doing?

Seriously, way to go TxDOT. Sure, you guys miscounted $1 billion. You’ve said you cannot build roads again because you’re broke. But, hey, you did just win 15 excellence in advertising awards!