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…
Month: June 2009
Quote of the Day
“Some scholars believe that the spread of democracy, which then put land ownership and wealth in the hands of many, and the Industrial Revolution, which made the mass production of goods possible and spread wealth throughout society, are at the root of the environmental crisis,” and “By destroying paganism, white Christianity helped to exploit nature.”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
TX Legislature in Review: Homeowners’ Insurance
Texas Department of Insurance sunset legislation would have made modest improvements to the status quo, but the failure of the TDI sunset bill means consumers will still be subject to the regulatory confusion they’ve suffered thought over the last decade or so. Unless, of course, the entire Texas Department of Insurance goes away. Something similar happened…
Tax Cuts Work
In his recent National Review Online article on the federal government’s deficit spending, Rich Lowry wrote, “The same way overzealous Republicans once argued that tax cuts paid for themselves, Obama Democrats argue that deficit spending pays for itself.” Lowry’s statement is problematic on several levels. For one, it essentially equates tax cutting and deficit spending,…