What do you do when the price of an essential commodity has risen so high that it fuels inflation, devastates family budgets and threatens the economy? Obviously, you raise taxes on it, causing its price to go up even more! At least, that’s what you do if the...
When government resorts to advertising its programs and services, that’s a sure sign government has gotten just a little too big. Texas bureaucrats spend millions every year advertising the Children’s Health Insurance Program and other welfare assistance...
The San Antonio Express-News reports that numerous school districts in San Antonio and around the state are preparing to ask their voters to approve tax rate increases. One such district is San Antonio ISD which is on the verge of seeking a tax rate increase even...
In what is either a rare act of political honesty or an unbelievable admission of dereliction of duty, or both, State Rep. Fred Hill (R-Richardson) swore under oath that he doesn’t know anything about the state’s existing spending limit. Odd, considering he has...
The next time someone points to England as an example of anything other than a good place to get fish-and-chips, casually mention a study funded by their taxpayers. Girls, researchers there breathlessly announced this week, prefer pink. Sadly we don't have much to...
The Denton ISD school board has announced it will ask voters to approve a $282 million new bond initiative in November. Interestingly, $2 million of the proposal has nothing to do with students – it is to build a child care center for district employees. If this...
You might recall a few weeks ago I noted that the Legislature’s new $3 billion-over-10-year cancer fund was probably not going to accomplish much more than spend a lot of your money. Not my opinion, but that of scientists actually in the field. “(T)he...
Here’s a nice little scam floating around school districts: claiming credit for cutting taxes when they haven’t. You’ll remember that the Legislature bought down school “maintenance & operations” property taxes to $1, using proceeds from their new business...
Do you hear that knocking at your door? It’s the taxman, and he wants more money. Pay up. It’s bad enough that appraisal creep and unrestrained spending is taking a bigger and bigger bite out of taxpayers’ take-home pay, but now comes word that local...
Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin would be proud of their ideological progeny at the San Antonio Express-News. The long-dead communists, whose utopian Soviet state collapsed in disrepute and bankruptcy after an 80-year experiment in tyranny, Â focused on the collective...
For those outside Austin, there have been a flurry of reports lately illustrating why Austin is known as the People’s Republic of Travis County. The City Council is considering banning plastic bags from stores and they gave a $750,000 forgivable loan to a...
Fighting tax-and-spendoholics is like playing Wack-A-Mole at the arcade. You knock them down, only to find they pop right back up. The lesson? We have to move faster and hit harder. Last legislative session, taxpayers were successful in stopping tax-and-spendoholics...
State Sen. John Carona says in today’s Dallas Morning News that Texas must “stop the diversion of gas tax funds for other uses.†That’s welcome news. While the state’s constitution currently requires transportation funds to be used for transportation...
So you think you’re getting tax relief? If you live in Houston, chances are you are not. The school district there are doing everything they can to reach into your family’s pocket-book and exact every last dollar they can.Houston ISD and Cypress-Fairbanks ISD are...
Bad ideas are running rampant in Beantown. I’ve come to Boston for the National Conference of State Legislators. It should be called the National Conference for Growing Government. By and large, NCSL is a cheerleading session for those legislators, bureaucrats,...
Advocates of big government rarely let facts get in the way of their pursuit of growing budgets. Such is the case with Waco Tribune-Herald editor John Young, whose weekly column is very often devoted to the worship of government (of the activist variety) and the...
The headline in today's Houston Chronicle says it all: City union asks for property tax relief. My heart leapt for joy: Bureaucrats are now joining the call for tax relief! But then I read the article… They don't want property tax relief for all...
In Dallas County, total property values are up 16 percent, with about half of that attributable to increases on existing properties, according to a Dallas Morning News report. Although Collin County has not posted 2007 average home values yet, the Dallas Morning News...
The Houston Chronicle reported over the weekend that medical professionals are skeptical that the legislature’s new $3 billion “cancer fund” will accomplish much more than spend $3 billion of the taxpayers’ money. But, don’t worry, it was...
An elected official (a Republican, no less) told me yesterday he doesn’t mind paying taxes because it is “the price of freedom.” His doe-eyed statement was wrong on a great many levels, practical and philosophical. First and foremost, freedom’s...
