My Favorite Books

Stained Glass
Witness
Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography
The Iliad
James
Sense and Sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
Animal Farm
Doctrine of Endless Punishment
Marco Polo, If You Can
Who's on First
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
1984
The Hunt for Red October
A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss


Bill Peacock's favorite books »

Links

Subsidies Anyone?

According to the Cato Institute, federal subsidy programs topped the 2,000 mark for the first time last week. Almost half of those have been created in the last 20 years: the number of federal subsidy programs soared 21 percent during the 1990s and 40 percent during the 2000s.
As Chris Edwards, Cato’s director of tax [...]

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

There are a lot of ways to measure how the economy is doing. But employment, or jobs, is probably the measure that means the most to us. On a macro level, we understand that it means something good when we read that two million new jobs were created and unemployment fell to 4.2%. On the [...]

Plano Lowers the Cost of Living

It is not often that governments voluntarily reduces fees or taxes. So when one does, it is worth taking a closer look.
Last month, Plano voted to eliminate impact fees on developers building new homes and businesses. The fees were charged based on the size of the water meter for the project, and typically ran from [...]

Consumer Protection Usually Doesn’t Live Up to its Name

It seems as if the folks in Washington don’t have enough to do with taking over the American financial, automobile, and health care industries. The talk now is about creating a new consumer protection agency to “protect … the financial well-being of American consumers.”
While this may sound like a good cause, a review of the [...]

TX Legislature in Review: Financial Regulation

It is not high finance, but short-term lending helps a lot of consumers out of tight places. This session, multiple bills would have significantly reduced or banned short-term lending.
Banks and credit unions generally won’t make short-term loans, so people in need of quick access to funds have to turn higher cost alternatives. While critics claim [...]

TX Legislature in Review: Telecommunications

The good news about telecom taxes is that they won’t be going up this session. The bad news is that they won’t be going down. Texas has some of the highest telecommunications taxes in the nation. We’ve made progress recently in reducing those taxes, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Our recent policy [...]

TX Legislature in Review: Tort Reform

There were numerous attempts this session to reverse the achievements of the last ten years or so that have reduced abuse of Texas’ civil justice system, reduced excessive litigation costs, and increased access to the courts for those who are truly injured.
These included: reducing access to workers compensation (the Entergy bill); lessening causation standards in [...]

TX Legislature in Review: Electricity and Renewable Energy

Most of the electricity bills this session had one thing in common—they were going to make electricity more expensive for Texas consumers or taxpayers. Fortunately, most of them didn’t pass.
The major bill that did pass provided incentives, i.e. subsidies, for electricity generation plants equipped with carbon capture technology. But it may not wind up costing [...]

TX Legislature in Review: Property Rights

Eminent Domain reform moved forward for the first time since 2005. HJR 14 will stop local governments from using blight designations to condemn blocks of perfectly good homes and businesses for economic development projects. That is good news—El Paso and other cities may be out of the downtown redevelopment business when it comes to using [...]

TX Legislature in Review: Windstorm Insurance

The windstorm insurance bill fixed the symptoms without solving the underlying problems with TWIA. General revenue is no longer at risk, but coastal policy holders are still stuck with the most expensive windstorm insurance possible and taxpayers and policyholders statewide will still have to pick up the bill
That will especially be true if we get [...]