Pre-kindergarten advocates cite studies that underestimate costs and exaggerate benefits. For example, a study by the Bush School at Texas A&M University claims taxpayers will save at least $3.50 for every dollar spent on preschool. The research clearly shows this claim is misleading and wrong. Any academic benefits from pre-kindergarten fade out by the third grade, so a Cadillac preschool may not equal fewer dropouts.

Examine the results of states with taxpayer funded universal public preschool. Oklahoma and Georgia have both had universal pre-kindergarten for more than a decade and have not seen a rise in fourth grade reading, math, or science scores, as documented in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

If policymakers want to help working families afford preschool, do not turn pre-kindergarten into an entitlement and further grow government. Instead, give families a tax cut and let them use the money to choose the best environment for their child.

- Brooke Terry]]>PublicationTue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDTThe Wall Street Journal reported last week that the number of Americans lacking health insurance fell by 3 percent last year, or 1.3 million people. An encouraging sign? Not at all, as that reduction came entirely from the expansion of government programs. According to the article, the number of people covered by government health insurance increased from 80.3 million in 2006 to 83 million last year.

Double-check my math, but if the number of people covered by government programs increased by 2.7 million, but the number of uninsured decreased by only 1.3 million, that means 1.4 million people dropped their private coverage to get on the government’s tab.

This happens every time government expands health care programs. Fiscal conservatives point out how these expansions cause government to crowd out private insurance and reduce personal responsibility, but our elected officials never listen. Well, here’s your proof: crowd-out is real and it costs taxpayers billions of dollars to pay for people who used to pay their own way.

- Kalese Hammonds]]>PublicationFri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT The Wall Street Journal writes, “Current law prohibits any ‘exploration leading to development of ANWR,’ but that prohibition is aimed at exploratory drilling. Seismic testing involves the equivalent of 3D photography and is environmentally benign, so Mr. Bush is well in his rights to issue the order. It's time to get serious about drilling, and a new survey is a useful first step.”

It’s certainly nice to see leadership from the Lone Star State on federal energy policy — much like the leadership from Gov. Perry in seeking a waiver from the economically damaging federal ethanol mandate — as opposed to what is being put forward by the anti-domestic-drilling crowd and the Gang of 10.

- Drew Thornley]]>PublicationWed, 20 Aug 2008 14:00:00 MDTCalculating the Demand for Charter Schools."

At 5:10 p.m., Brooke will be a guest of Dan Patrick (KSEV AM 700 - Houston). And at 6:35 p.m., she will be interviewed by guest host Michael Quinn Sullivan on the "Pratt on Texas" program (KFYO AM 790 - Lubbock).]]>PublicationWed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT In Santa Barbara, home of the 1969 oil spill that effectively spawned the modern environmental movement, GOO (Get Oil Out!) – a group that formed in response to the 1969 spill – endorsed a plan for drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara.

In Maryland, long-time “green” Gov. Martin O’Malley is now supporting nuclear power expansion in the Free State.

And here in Texas, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition dropped their opposition to a proposed 800-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Limestone County, in return for promises from NRG Texas, the utility proposing the plant.

In response to the folly of unrealistic energy policies, the tide may finally be turning – which is a great thing because Americans need relief.

- Drew Thornley]]>PublicationWed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT The Los Angeles Times reports Kelso wants this big stash of taxpayer cash to renovate prison clinics and build seven health care facilities for 10,000 inmates – even a dental facility to make sure inmates’ teeth are in top form. In a perversion of federalism, Kelso is also demanding a $2 million fine against the state for every day the billions aren’t released.

Texas isn’t immune, as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s 2010-11 budget request seeks an extra $181 million to fund inmate health care. Nonetheless, the state’s current medical cost per inmate is half of California’s, even before Judge Henderson’s order.

Perhaps Dallas County has the right idea. It is considering charging misdemeanants in jail $25 per day for room and board, though it forecasts many won’t be able to pay. Prison inmates are even more likely to be broke, indicating the need to expand private sector inmate work programs to defray incarceration costs.

Another solution – don’t imprison as many nonviolent elderly offenders for long periods. TDCJ’s annual report released last week noted that one of the oldest offenders released was James Terry Bray of Midland, who served five years for drug possession and is now a free man at the age of 87. How much taxpayer health care did he consume, and was he really a danger to the public in his mid-80s?

- Marc Levin ]]>PublicationTue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDTTTARA Research Foundation released a study comparing what Texans actually paid in property taxes last year versus what they would have paid had the 79th Texas Legislature not passed the 2006 property tax reforms.

Texans may not know it, but they have actually seen a net savings of $7 billion in school property taxes. By using surplus funds and creating new dedicated revenue sources, the legislature has been able to deliver “meaningful” school property tax relief to taxpayers across the state. So why don’t they know it?

As the report notes, Texans “pay a myriad of property taxes that are typically combined into a single bill.” So even though the legislature may have been successful at limiting the growth of school property taxes, nothing was done to address the growth of city, county, or special district property taxes. Add to that inflated property appraisals, the creation of new taxes, and voter approved tax hikes, and away goes your property tax relief.

Rather than continuing to patch a broken system, the Texas Legislature would be wise to eliminate the property tax altogether in favor of a broad-based consumption tax. That may be the only way that taxpayers would finally see true “tax relief.”

- Talmadge Heflin]]>PublicationTue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDTSunset Report on the Texas Department of Insurance, which calls for less regulation on the homeowners’ insurance market.

We believe that consumers are in a better position than state regulators to determine what insurance they want to buy and how much they want to pay for it. The price of a cell phone and a year’s service plan today can come close to the cost of a homeowners’ insurance policy, and the contract is certainly no less complex. Yet no one is calling for the Texas Public Utility Commission to regulate cell phone rates and plans – at least, not yet.

But it wouldn’t surprise us if they did, because “consumer advocates” always seem to think that the government can make better decisions for consumers than consumers can make for themselves. That is why they are fighting to keep the Office of Public Insurance Counsel, which serves as a “consumer representative” in the regulatory process.

Our approach is that rather than have a consumer advocate in a convoluted regulatory process, we ought to instead have a consumer friendly regulatory process. Essentially, the regulatory process ought to be designed to let consumers choose their own rates and coverage, with TDI on the lookout in case of fraud or insolvency.

We’ll see who wins this battle – consumers or their self-proclaimed advocates – during the 2009 legislative session.

- Bill Peacock]]>PublicationMon, 18 Aug 2008 15:00:00 MDT Unlike in the real world, a person’s productivity has no impact on their quality of life. No wonder laziness and riots are commonplace.

Thankfully, Arizona’s four-year-old Get Ready program changes that. As recently highlighted in the Christian Science Monitor, nearly every part of an inmate’s existence -- from the quality of the food they receive to how late they can stay up to trips to the canteen -- are adjusted based on their performance.

All inmates in the program must work; the type of prison job they can apply for depends on whether they have completed their GED. Inmates are empowered to make choices and then bear the consequences, just like in the real world. Due to the uniformity of traditional prisons, Catherine Rohr, who runs the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, says former inmates struggle with ordering from a menu, as they have become automatons behind bars.

Sure enough, the recidivism rate of inmates completing the Get Ready program is 2 percent and inmate violence has plummeted. Moreover, no new funds were used to implement Get Ready.

Texas offers good time credit (except for state jail felons) and bad behavior lands 11,000 inmates in solitary confinement, but more subtle daily adjustments and the availability of earned privileges are lacking compared to the Arizona program. Texas policymakers and corrections officials should be ready to learn from Arizona’s success.

- Marc Levin]]>PublicationMon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT Collin County shows the way
Medical tourism - What is it?
Medical tourism - Why is it cheaper?
Medical tourism - What can we learn?]]>PublicationTue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDTCollin County became the first county government in American history to post detailed spending information online for taxpayers to see. The finances of local government are the next frontier in government transparency.

Today’s evolving view of responsible government has meant that many state governments have posted more detailed spending information online for taxpayers. Local governments have been much slower to follow suit, even though local spending outpaces state spending in many states.

In an attempt to justify explosive budget growth, many local governments have begun to post their adopted budgets online. But these only provide a financial roadmap of local government spending and lack the precision and detail that a check register can provide.

By taking the next step in transparency and posting its check register online, Collin County has shown its commitment to accurate financial reporting and good governance. As citizens, it is our privilege to celebrate such responsible public leadership. As taxpayers, it is our challenge to make sure that everyone else – especially the remaining 253 Texas counties – understands its importance.

- James Quintero]]>PublicationTue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT Drilling the point home to Congress
Crude politics
State governments spending themselves broke
Teacher union agenda: Higher taxes
EPA continues food-for-fuel folly]]>PublicationMon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDTdependency mindset and big brother mentality that has lead to today’s welfare state. Not only do these go against the principles of limited government and personal responsibility on which our country was founded, but our “welfare state comes with a huge price tag,” as Walter Williams explains in his review of Edgar K. Browning’s new book, Stealing From Each Other.

"Browning entertains a discussion about when inequalities are just or unjust. For example, college graduates earn income higher than high-school dropouts. Some people prefer to work many hours and earn more than others who prefer to work fewer. Students who spend 25 or more hours a week on classroom preparation earn higher grades than students who spend five hours. Most would agree that these inequalities are just.

"There are other sources of inequalities that are unjust, such as when incomes result from fraud, corruption, stealing, exploitation, oppression and the like. Such sources of inequality play an insignificant role in producing income inequality in America. Most economists agree that income is closely related to productivity.

"Much of the justification for the welfare state is to reduce income inequality by making income transfers to the poor."

The result of this policy of redistribution is a loss of productivity; why work to have it given away? Browning estimates that this loss of productivity has reduced GDP by 25 percent, or $4 trillion. Couple that loss with the $620 billion that federal, state and local governments spend on welfare programs – not including social security or uncompensated medical care – and it is apparent that not only does the policy of income redistribution conflict with our founding fathers’ principles…it costs us an arm and a leg!

- Kalese Hammonds]]>PublicationMon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT In 2005, we worked with lawmakers to reallocate some probation funding to performance-based grants for departments that use progressive sanctions to reduce technical revocations, resulting in net savings of $55 million from fewer technical revocations. Last year, lawmakers followed our recommendation to avoid new prisons; the alternative package included expanding intermediate sanctions facilities, which lock up technical violators for an average of 90 days, usually as the final sanction before revocation.

Inspiration for the next phase of Texas probation reform could come from across the ocean. I recently attended a presentation on Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) program, an innovative probation approach to control revocations and promote compliance featured in The Wall Street Journal.

Participants – either drug possession offenders or property offenders with a drug problem – agree to strict rules, including attending mandatory drug treatment and calling into an automated phone system every morning to find out if they will report to the court for drug testing. If they test positive, they are immediately jailed for several days to a week. If this happens repeatedly, the probationer is revoked. The program has reduced the revocation rate from 31 percent to 9 percent and cut drug use by 91 percent.

While Texas probation departments can use “shock jail,” there is a disincentive to do so because most county jails are full and the county pays for them, while the state picks up the prison costs – about $360 million attributable to technical revocations per biennium. This illustrates the need for further changes in probation funding that would encourage, rather than discourage, initiatives like HOPE in Texas.

- Marc Levin]]>PublicationThu, 07 Aug 2008 12:00:00 MDT Kathleen Hartnett White, Director of the Foundation's Center for Natural Resources, has chronicled the harmful effects of the federal government's misguided food-for-fuel policies. To learn more about this issue, here are the links to her statement on Gov. Rick Perry's ethanol waiver request and her newspaper commentary, "The Folly of Food as Fuel."]]>PublicationThu, 07 Aug 2008 09:30:00 MDTThirty-one states now face a combined budget deficit estimated at more than $40 billion stemming from slowing tax revenues, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures.

Many in the mainstream media have been content to end this “doom-and-gloom” tale here, but to do so does not do proper justice to the actual truth.

Tax revenues have slowed this fiscal year as many Americans have had to tighten their belts and cut back on their spending. However, this is not a practice mirrored by those in government; in fact, government has been on a spending binge for the last several years.

During the second quarter of 2008, state and local government spending rose 7.8 percent as compared to the same time last year, while tax revenue only increased 2.5 percent. In fact, state and local governments are on pace to spend more than $2 trillion in 2008 -- nearly 15 percent of the nation’s GDP.

Driving the surge in states spending has been the creation of new public sector jobs, better compensation packages for government employees, and explosive growth in health care entitlements (read: Medicaid).

It’s time our elected officials learned the art of fiscal discipline. Hard-earned taxpayer dollars do not exist for the purposes of growing the public sector, nor is it very prudent for government to place such a heavy burden on the private sector -- as doing so has the rather unfortunate consequence of hurting their money supply.

- James Quintero]]>PublicationWed, 06 Aug 2008 17:00:00 MDTPublic Utility Commission of Texas’ final approval of the plan to build 2,376 miles of electric transmission from West Texas to the IH-35 corridor and upper Gulf Coast, let’s take a closer look at its costs.

All reports stop at saying the Electric Reliability Council of Texas estimates the plan to cost $4.93 billion. For transmission lines and substations alone, the cost is estimated at $2,074,915.82 per mile.

However, this is not the end of the costs. ERCOT’s estimates do not include the higher right-of-way costs likely to be incurred in congested areas. Additionally, ERCOT’s costs were estimated using straight-line lengths. Thus, transmission costs were estimated using a best-case-scenario approach. Estimates also exclude non-transmission costs of wind energy development, which will be passed on to ratepayers as well. Finally, ERCOT calculated costs using 2007 dollars. Seen any articles on inflation lately?

When all is said and done, we will wish those lines cost only $4.93 billion.

- Drew Thornley ]]>PublicationWed, 06 Aug 2008 00:00:00 MDT Get the LED in
Ethanol waiver still needed
The new Senator No
Nuclear myths melted down
Welcome back the company doctor]]>PublicationMon, 04 Aug 2008 14:15:00 MDTRobert Novak has announced his immediate retirement after being diagnosed with a brain tumor last week. Novak was my guest on the July 24th edition of Texas PolicyCast. We continue our prayers and best wishes for a complete recovery.

- David Guenthner]]>PublicationThu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 MDT If Dr. Friedman stood for anything, it was freedom. In his book, Free to Choose, Friedman points out that if we are to wisely choose between the “road to serfdom” and “voluntary cooperation between free individuals, “we must … understand the intimate connection between political freedom and economic freedom.”

That connection is too often overlooked today. Economic regulation today—from consumer protection laws to price controls—is based on the ignorance of this principle: “[I]f an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only from the expense of the other.”

Friedman continues, “If we continue down this path, there is no doubt where it will end. … If it is appropriate for the government to protect us from using dangerous bicycles and cap guns, the logic calls for prohibiting still more dangerous activities such as hang-gliding, motorcycling, and skiing.”

Back in 1980, Friedman was optimistic that we would ultimately choose another path: “Fortunately, we are waking up. We are again recognizing the dangers of an over-governed society, coming to understand that good objectives can be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.”

For supporters of limited government today, 1980 and the Reagan wave of economic freedom sure seem a distant memory, and President Clinton’s proclamation that “the era of big government is over” seems in doubt.

But we must not forget that we still have a choice and should hold fast to Milton Friedman’s optimistic vision for the future.

- Bill Peacock]]>Publication