Statement by The Honorable Talmadge Heflin, Director of TPPF’s Center for Fiscal Policy: “As lawmakers put the final touches on this session’s transportation funding centerpiece, we urge Members to enact the ‘floor’ provision that guarantees a strong Economic Stabilization Fund moving forward. We also commend lawmakers for working to bring about greater truth-in-taxation by eliminating...
Press Release July 25, 2013AUSTIN – Texas Public Policy Foundation policy experts are available to offer discussion and further detail regarding the recently released paper The Verdict on Federal Prison Reform: State Successes Offer Keys to Reducing Crime & Costs authored by Marc Levin, Director of TPPF’s Center for Effective Justice and policy analyst Vikrant Reddy. According to the...
Press Release July 22, 2013AUSTIN – According to the Texas Workforce Commission’s latest employment report, Texas continues to be a national leader in job growth. Texas’ unemployment rate for June 2013 remains unchanged at 6.5 percent – still well below the nation’s June unemployment rate of 7.6 percent. “While Texas’ unemployment rate remains unchanged in June, the Lone Star...
Press Release July 22, 2013AUSTIN – Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Local Governance Director James Quintero is available to discuss how Detroit’s fate could be replicated in Texas without local governance reforms. TPPF recently launched the Center for Local Governance that will promote excellence in local governance via sound budgeting, citizen accountability, and greater transparency. James Quintero the...
Press Release July 19, 2013AUSTIN – Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Local Governance Director James Quintero is available to discuss how Detroit’s fate could be replicated in Texas without local governance reforms. TPPF recently launched the Center for Local Governance that will promote excellence in local governance via sound budgeting, citizen accountability, and greater transparency. James Quintero the...
Press Release July 19, 2013The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently lacks the ability to regulate the booming U.S. shale gas industry; an industry that produced 8.5 trillion cubic feet of gas in 2011, up from 1.9 tf3 in 2007. The environmental-friendly, anti-business agency has struggled to grasp control of the industry in any form possible and has stalked gas-producing firms in an effort to discover any instance of environmental degradation, sanctioning federal intervention. Thus, it was a great surprise to many observers when the EPA gave up on a four year, multimillion dollar study that attempted to link hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) activities and contaminated groundwater in Pavillion, WY. The study begin in 2009 after the EPA claims it received numerous complaints regarding drinking water quality from ground wells in Pavillion, where 169 production wells were extracting gas from lower shale formations through fracking. The EPA presented two drafts of their study, one in 2009 and another in 2012, which both lacked sufficient evidence to explain the source of contamination in the groundwater and received extensive criticism from industry and the state officials. In recent weeks, the EPA has conceded, relinquished the study and handed it over to the state of Wyoming. The agency has made two points here: it has demonstrated that groundwater contamination is not directly associated with fracking activities and it has disclosed that state agencies are the best facet for regulation and overlook when it comes to resource recovery practices. What made Pavillion, WY such a formidable target for the EPA is its geology. Most locations in the U.S. require drilling tools to plunge 10,500 to 13,500 feet below the surface to recover shale gas. In Pavillion, the gas wells are as shallow as 1,220 feet, while wells for tapping groundwater are up to 800 feet deep. If there is a relationship between fracking and contamination, it should be sited at Pavillion due to the unusually close proximity of resources. The agency almost certainly believed that the Pavillion case was an answer to their quest of linkage. However, the EPA failed to prove any connection and could not deliberately carry on with an unwinnable mission. The EPA demonstrated its true colors with Pavillion. It sought to provide scientific analysis to final solidify the vilification of shale gas fracking and viewed the production in the city as easy prey. Environmentalists also removed their veil by displaying contempt and dissatisfaction with the EPA’s decision to pull out due to lack of evidence. Environmentalists should be joyful that the practice to extract cleaner burning fuel does not harm the environmental through recovery, but instead they are frustrated with an inability to mandate more control over the industry. The Pavillion outcome makes it difficult to truly understand where both the EPA’s and environmentalists true intentions lie.
Press Release July 10, 2013The Obama administration announced a welter of delays last week for the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). Chief among them is a one-year delay of the employer mandate, a key feature of the law that would have imposed huge costs on all companies with more than 50 full-time employees. Citing inadequate information systems development, the ruling delays employers’ requirement to prove they have offered affordable health insurance to employees. Because state exchange administrators had planned to use employer reports to verify employees’ eligibility for tax subsidies, Tuesday’s ruling created even more uncertainties for the law’s implementation. Three days later, the administration announced it will solve this problem by assuming that those seeking subsidies to purchase insurance through state exchanges have not been offered affordable insurance from their employer. What’s more, the government will not make any attempt to confirm applicants’ statements about their household income. In other words, the billions of dollars in federal subsidies dispensed through the ObamaCare exchanges will operate on the honor system. Yuval Levin suggests that the Obama administration’s decisions are motivated by a desire to get as many people as possible onto the exchanges and receiving subsidies in 2014. To do this, the feds exempted employers from penalties if they drop coverage and dump their workers onto the exchanges, and then ruled that those applying for exchange subsidies do not have to prove that they qualify for them. These rulings demonstrate the administration’s willingness to arbitrarily enforce a law passed by Congress. So far, government officials in Washington have been implementing health care reform inconsistently and with dangerously little regard for the law. Based on the ruling last week, we should expect more of this in the months to come.
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A new study from CREDO at Stanford University shows that charter schools nationwide have improved significantly over the last several years, and are having a major impact on some of most vulnerable student populations. From Fox News: “The average charter school student showed reading gains equivalent to those that would be expected from an extra eight days of school compared to traditional school students, the study said. Math gains were about equal among the two groups. The results were much improved from the 2009 study, when charter students lost the equivalent of seven days of learning in English and 22 days in math.” The study found that charter schools had an even more academically significant impact amongst low-income and minority students: “When broken down into groups, the study showed that black students gained the equivalent of 14 days of learning by attending charter schools but that black students living in poverty saw even greater benefits, the equivalent of 29 days in reading and 36 days in math. Hispanic English-language learners saw even higher gains, though Hispanics in general scored similarly to Hispanics in traditional public schools.” The study is results based and did not extensively examine why charter schools were getting such strong results, but CREDO director Margaret Raymond theorized two causations. The first is long-standing, that charter schools’ capacity to direct funds with more flexibility than a traditional public school gives them a greater ability to address the specific needs of their student body. The second reason is that in recent years, many states have strengthened their accountability measures for charter schools, making it much easier to close a failing campus. The CREDO report called the ability to do as much “he strongest tool available to ensure quality across the sector.” As much might be a very positive sign for Texas charter schools. With the passage of SB 2, our legislature not only elevated the cap on open-enrollment charters from 215 to 305, but streamlined the process for closing a low-performing charter. The CREDO results would suggest that because of the latter, Texas charters could experience a boost in academic performance over the next several years. We have a massive, ever-growing student population in Texas. More high quality open-enrollment charter schools means a better shot at a bright future for thousands of our students, particularly minority and low-income students. The CREDO results re-enforce that SB 2 was a strong, strong step for Texas education, and for the future of our state as a whole.
Press Release June 27, 2013The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s nationally significant criminal-justice reform efforts were credited in a front-page Wall Street Journal story today on having spurred a national “conservative quest to rethink criminal sentencing and rewrite state penal codes.” The story is available in today’s print edition, and online here: http://on.wsj.com/11RSuFU According to the WSJ: “The conservative quest to rethink criminal...
Press Release June 24, 2013