Texas [Insert Health Care Pun] against Obamacare!!!

"And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart."
Galatians 6:9

FANTASTIC:

Fort Worth-based U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor on Friday ruled that a major provision of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional — and that the rest of the landmark law must fall as well.

In February, a Texas-led coalition of 20 states sued the federal government to end the health care law in its entirety, arguing that after Congress in December 2017 gutted one of its major provisions, the rest of the law was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the law because its individual mandate — a financial penalty for not having insurance — could be interpreted as a tax. But after Congress set that tax at $0, the Texas coalition claimed the rest of the law no longer had “constitutional cover.”

O’Connor sided with Texas, ruling that the individual mandate was rendered unconstitutional. That portion of the law, he argued, is not severable from other provisions, and so the rest of the law must fall.

Honestly, this should be a no-brainer.  Obamacare was originally upheld as a tax.  That tax is gone.  Case closed.

That being said, don't ever underestimate John Roberts' willingness to invent rationalizations for this wretched law.  That's why the "tax" argument emerged in the first place.  It will be interesting to see into what new intellectual pretzels John Roberts might twist himself.

TPPF has more:

“Today’s historic win striking down Obamacare is only the first step,” said Robert Henneke, general counsel and director of the Center for the American Future at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “We need to focus on the future and look to states like Texas to lead in restoring the relationship between doctor and patient, unencumbered by government and insurance company red tape. Let’s focus on solutions that will drive down costs and restore choice in doctor.”

Please, make it so.

Bottom Line: Health care freedom requires an unencumbered relationship between consumers and providers.  Yesterday's ruling was a necessary, but insufficient, step in that process.  Kudos to Paxton and TPPF!!!

Chickens of Self-Inflicted Political Wounds Come Home to Roost

"Then the king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem, which were on the south of the Mount of Corruption, which Solomon king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom the abomination of the people of Ammon."
2 Kings 23:13

[Note: You can read Cruz's full rationalization statement on his vote here.]

Sad:

WASHINGTON - The Farm Bill, one of the most important pieces of federal legislation to millions of Texans, successfully made its way through both chambers of Congress this week and awaits the signature of President Donald Trump.

Formally known as the Agriculture and Nutrition Act, the Farm Bill is a massive spending package that will deliver $867 billion over 10 years to subsidize farming and nutrition.

....

It passed with widespread support in the U.S. Senate, including from the two Texans – John Cornyn and Ted Cruz – who serve in that chamber.

....

Cruz's support was noteworthy. As a freshman, he voted against the 2014 Farm Bill. Moreover, he frequently aligns himself with the conservative group Heritage Action which lobbied hard against the Farm Bill's passage because of the lack of more work requirements for SNAP recipients.

"I think it was unfortunate that the conference committee removed the improvements on work requirements that were in the farm bill," he told the Tribune earlier Wednesday. "I would've liked to have seen them there. I introduced an amendment on the floor of the Senate to toughen the work requirements because we should be working to get people out of the trap of dependency and back in the workforce, back on their own feet and back able to provide for their own family."

Cruz narrowly won re-election in November, largely based on strong rural turnout.

There you have it.  The Texas Farm Bureau wanted this bill.  The Texas Farm Bureau just endorsed Cruz.  In his current weakened political position, Cruz can't say no.  It's awful.  It's disgusting.  But it's reality.  Unfortunately.

Taking on the ag. lobby requires tremendous political capital.  In 2014, Ted Cruz had that kind of political capital.  He doesn't anymore.

Bottom Line:  Like it or not, the seeds of Wednesday's disappointment have been being sown for awhile....

Abbott thinks he can Outsmart Free Market

"Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord,
But a just weight is His delight."
Proverbs 11:1

For crying out loud:

Apple Inc. is planning to spend $1 billion to build a new 133-acre corporate campus in North Austin that initially will employ up to 5,000 people, cementing Austin’s status as the high-tech company’s largest hub outside of its California headquarters.

The facility — which will be less than a mile from Apple’s existing main Austin campus on Parmer Lane — eventually could expand to accommodate up to 15,000 workers, the company said. Apple employs about 6,200 people in Austin now. Counting contractors, its current Austin workforce numbers about 7,000.

....

Apple is in line to receive as much as $25 million in taxpayer-funded grants for the new Austin campus from the state’s deal-closing Texas Enterprise Fund, based on investment and job creation at the site. It also is seeking a 15-year property tax abatement from Williamson County, where the project is located just over the line from Travis County, that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over the life of the deal, although specific numbers weren’t available Wednesday.

Apple isn’t receiving any financial incentives from the city of Austin.

Apple — which is one of the most valuable companies in the world with a market capitalization of about $803 billion — was pledged an estimated $36 million in combined incentives from the state, the city of Austin and Travis County in 2012, when it agreed to build its existing Parmer campus.

[Note: Emphasis added.]

SERIOUSLY?!?  The $803bn figure citied in the Statesman article means Apple's market cap is comparable with the GDP of the Netherlands.  Would you give subsidies to the Netherlands?!?

By giving preferential treatment to the wealthy and well connected, Abbott will inevitably increase the burden of government on Texans.  Every penny that goes to Apple is one fewer penny to go to everything else on which the state spends money.  Don't get us started on how this deal will narrow the tax base in WillCo.  That being said, we do feel a modest point of civic pride that Austin won't be offering any incentives.

The worst part is how this corrodes our political system.  We're still skeptical that these sorts of programs encourage out-of-state liberals to move to Texas in meaningful numbers.  But it's absolutely correct that they incentivize hiring lobbyists over innovation or competition on price and service.  This is especially galling in tech, whose large players are well known for seeking subsidies for themselves while attempting to regulate their competition out of business.

Bottom Line:  Usually, socialism is when the rich steal from the middle class by using the poor as human shields.  For Greg Abbott, however, it looks like we can drop the pretense with the poor.  Yaaay Texas Republicans!!!

#TXLEGE: Abbott correctly prioritizes Property TAX RELIEF

"But the former governors who were before me laid burdens on the people, and took from them bread and wine, besides forty shekels of silver. Yes, even their servants bore rule over the people, but I did not do so, because of the fear of God."
Nehemiah 5:15

Good:

An early estimate shows Gov. Greg Abbott's proposal for a school finance fix would provide three times more dollars for property tax relief as it would additional money for school districts in 2020.

That gap would widen to five times more by 2021, costing the state an additional $3 billion over that time period, according to a Texas Education Agency estimate released Tuesday during a meeting of the state's school finance commission.

In raw numbers, estimates show Abbott's proposal would give taxpayers a break of $992 million in 2020, which would increase to $3.7 billion by 2023. It would provide $301 million additional funds for school districts in 2020, a figure that would drop to $74 million by 2023.

"For every three dollars spent on buying down tax relief, school districts get about a dollar of that," Nicole Conley-Johnson, chief financial officer at the Austin Independent School District, said of the governor's pitch.

[Note: Emphasis added.]

The article goes on to quote a number of educrats crying wolf about alleged shortcomings in education funding.  This despite the FACT that Texas spends over $60 BILLION annually on socialized "public" education.  The money's already there.

That being said, nothing in the preceding paragraph should preclude us from funding that system more efficiently.  Nor does it change the fact that shifting education funding from the local to the state level is the easiest, practical, way to move from property taxes to consumption taxes.  But if you can't run the system on $60 BILLION+, how much money will ever be enough?!?

TPPF says it well:

AUSTIN—Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation responded to the release of a new draft report from the Texas Commission on Public School Finance. The draft report repurposes existing school finance dollars to provide incentive for school districts to improve student outcomes.

“Repurposing existing tax dollars to incent school districts to improve student outcomes is a great idea,” said Kara Belew, senior education policy advisor. “Without any new taxes, Texas school districts can repurpose funds and improve student outcomes by adopting teacher merit pay programs, which encourage our best teachers to stay in the classroom.”

[Note: "Repurpose" is bureaucrat-speak for 'spend more wisely.']

Again, $60 BILLION + ought to be sufficient.

Bottom Line: There are any number of ways Texas can more responsibly fund education.  But to get there, the educrats need to under stand that meaningful NET relief for taxpayers is non-negotiable.  Kudos to Governor Abbott for making that clear.

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Note: If you want to understand what's wrong with school finance in Texas, consider the following result that popped up unprompted on Google....

Patrick, once again, makes poorly informed media speculation look foolish

"with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love,"
Ephesians 4:2

Like it or not, this is reality:

PR 18 12 11 by on Scribd

Patrick's endorsement comes on the heels of a report in an Austin lobby publication speculating he was about to run.  Of course, for anyone reasonably plugged in, neither of these developments should come as a surprise.  It's an open secret that people are trying to recruit Patrick into this race.  It's also not a secret that Patrick has been pouring cold water on those attempts for a year.  Today's announcement makes it official.

The funniest part about this development, however, is that it's the second time in as many years that Patrick has had to shoot down baseless speculation that he was going to run for another office.  In neither case was Patrick doing any work to set up such a campaign.  NEWSFLASH: Dan Patrick likes being Lieutenant Governor.

It's also worth noting that Texas' state and federal officials have been singing kumbaya since Hurricane Harvey.

As for a Cornyn challenge: Find a credible candidate.  Not that guy you like on Facebook who's lost primaries for both the Texas and U.S. house.  A credible candidate.  (Hint: Nobody credible will run this cycle because of this guy.)

Bottom Line: Today's announcement shouldn't surprise anyone who has the slightest clue....

#TXLEGE: How badly do Municipal Pensions underperform?!?

"Likewise the soldiers asked him, saying, 'And what shall we do?'"

So he said to them, 'Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages.' ”
Luke 3:14

Wow; via the DMN:

All but a handful of the local public pension funds in Texas have the same problem. They picked the wrong monkeys to manage their money. The result is underperformance. In many cases it means serious underfunding of workers' retirements.

That's the sorry story for most of the pension plans created to serve public employees for our cities, counties, police and fire departments. The data comes from the public pension search tool on the website for the Texas comptroller. That's where you can find a database of all the funds in Texas.

The data plainly says that the police need to police their funds more actively and the fire departments have a three-alarm pension fire to attend.

Am I indulging in cheap, journalistic hyperbole? I wish I were.

My measuring stick was a simple, utterly conventional and low-cost index fund, the Vanguard Balanced Index fund Admiral shares, a fund that invests 60 percent of its money in the total domestic stock market and 40 percent in the total domestic bond market.

That's pretty vanilla. It's also dirt cheap. The Admiral shares, which require a minimum investment of $3,000, have an annual expense ratio of 0.07 percent. That means it would cost $7 to manage $10,000 for a year. It's a fraction of what it costs for individuals and most institutions to have "active" money management.

This is the most basic, one-stop shopping form of Couch Potato investing possible. Commit the money. Forget about it.

Our pension funds, on the other hand, invest in a variety of ways, pay higher fees and make direct investments in real estate. Many also make "alternative investments," which are expensive to manage and hard to measure. What they most certainly do is provide compensation levels for their managers that few police officers or firefighters will ever see.

So, how did the 86 managers do?

I can't tell you about six of them because they don't yet have 10-year track records. But of the remaining 80 funds, a whopping 76 failed to beat the cheap and simple index fund. Four beat it, but the real number is probably lower.

Bottom Line: This is astonishing. Even if appeals to abstract notions of fiscal sustainability didn't work, one would think appeals to self-interest would. Yet here we are....

#TXLEGE: ELIMINATE Corporate Welfare; Streamline School Finance

"Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord,
But a just weight is His delight."
Proverbs 11:1

We've previously discussed the Chapter 313 program; now, TPPF has some appalling new findings:

AUSTIN— Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation published the paper “Breaking the Bank: Robin Hood and Chapter 313.”

The paper’s author Stanley Greer, a senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a senior research associate for the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, released the following statement:

“Under Chapter 313, important decisions about state funding for schools are taken out of the hands of lawmakers who are accountable to state taxpayers. In fact, Chapter 313 has played a major role in transforming the funding of Texas’ K-12 public schools into an extremely complicated and counterproductive game of ‘beggar thy neighbor.’”

Despite public school officials in districts benefiting from Chapter 313 being highly in favor of the financial gains they’ve negotiated, little or no long-term educational benefit result from increased funding unaccompanied by meaningful changes in how students are instructed or how teachers are recruited and rewarded for their work.

“When the Texas Legislature convenes in January, legislators may decide whether or not the Texas Economic Development Act (Chapter 313) gets renewed,” said Cutter Gonzàlez, a policy analyst with the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “This paper exposes concerns about property tax abatements that show why lawmakers should keep decisions on state spending in their hands by letting Chapter 313 expire.”

Key Points:

• Chapter 313 tax abatements incentivize school districts to provide tax abatements to every business that applies because they can pass the cost on to taxpayers across the state. 

• Chapter 313 and Chapter 41, otherwise known as Robin Hood, jointly create a situation whereby relatively prosperous districts can raise revenues to fund their own operations more efficiently by granting tax abatements to businesses rather than by collecting taxes.

This isn't surprising.  Tax carve-outs are, essentially, central planning.  Central planning always fails.

That being said, this provides more ammunition for the potential coalition to eliminate tax exemptions as part of fixing school finance.

Bottom Line: Few things will broaden the tax base more quickly than abolishing Chapter 313....

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Read the whole paper:

Breaking the Bank ACEE Greer by Cahnman on Scribd