Abbott Caused Inflation

Our dear governor, Greg Abbott, likes to claim the superiority of his administration and policies in hosting the supposed economic success of Texas. In reality Texas has some of the most economically disadvantaged citizens in the country and higher wealth disparity between its citizens than 37 other states. Texas, unlike California – the state conservatives love to bash, doesn’t even make the top 25 in gross domestic product per resident.

Most recently conservatives have been bashing President Joe Biden on his handling of the economy and the “security” of the southern border. Abbott and his fellow liars claim that the current state of inflation is somehow Biden’s fault, especially high gas prices and that Biden has an open door policy on the Mexican border.

Let’s be clear, no president controls gas prices to any great degree. Oil and gasoline are international commodities and their prices fluctuate based on projected availability of that commodity. The notion that “energy independence” and higher production in the U.S. would somehow insulate us from price fluctuations is beyond ludicrous. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along the subsequent embargo of its oil shipments has made oil more scarce on the world market and countries that previously purchased Russian oil now must buy it from somewhere else and even if it isn’t U.S. oil directly oil produced here still ends up covering the gap created and therefore is priced accordingly. Any action that Biden might take to increase oil production in the U.S. would take years to percolate through the system as there are thousands of acres of federal land that have been leased to oil companies for years but never drilled on.

Gov. Abbott’s calamitous political stunt targeting international trade cost Texas more than $4 billion in damages, the economic consulting firm The Perryman Group. The consultants estimate that Abbott’s now-rescinded policy which required commercial vehicles to undergo additional inspections after passing through federal border check points but didn’t actually do much checking “will cost the equivalent of 77,000 job years for the country and 36,300 for Texas’ economy,” according to The Dallas Morning News.

In the city of Pharr, one of the busiest land crossings in the country, Abbott’s political stunt cost the area roughly $200 million every single day in losses. The Perryman Group estimates that Abbott caused the nation roughly $9 billion in lost gross domestic product.

“The biggest losses were to the manufacturing sector, which took about 50% of the hit, followed by retail trade, wholesale trade and financial activities,” The Dallas Morning News reported. “Manufacturing and retail made up the bulk of the job losses.”

When Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador called Abbott’s border shenanigans “a very despicable way to act”, Abbott responded by threatening to reinstate his unpopular policy, claiming he has “the capability at any time” to resume his unnecessary secondary inspections.

Even Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a real right-wing nut-job, complained to NPR that "You're already seeing things like bananas, avocados, lemons and limes" go up in price because of this stunt.

The next time your conservative neighbors try to bash Joe Biden on the economy, remind them that it was Greg Abbott alone who cost the state billions of dollars and caused higher inflation on grocery store shelves all to look good to Trump voters when he makes a run for the presidency in 2024.

Constitutional Amendment Election

Not everyone realizes that there are to separate elections in May. There’s the run-off for congress and other partisan offices on May 14 and the less well known Constitutional Amendment election on May 7. There are two propositions on the May 7 ballot, both are related to property taxes.

Proposition 1 says “The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school purposes on the resident homestead of a person who is elderly or disabled to reflect any statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the maximum compressed rate of maintenance and operations taxes imposed for those purposes on a homestead.”

Yes, it is widely agreed that the ballot language sound like gibberish, even lawyers have to ask experts what it means. Those experts will you refer back to the actual legislation that generated the proposition and the Texas constitution and explain that if passed it would reduce property taxes for elderly and disabled Texans by decreasing the amount they pay to public schools, which is generally the largest part of a homeowner’s tax bill. The state is responsible for making up the reduced revenue for school districts. This amendment will increase the state’s share of public school funding by more than $744 million from 2024 to 2026.

The reason that the Texas legislature passed this amendment by a wide bi-partisan margin is that in 2019, they passed a law which provided a property tax reduction to many homeowners but failed to include disabled or elderly homeowners because under the Texas Constitution, their tax rate is frozen. Proposition 1 would amend the Constitution to allow disabled and elderly homeowners to receive the benefits from the 2019 property tax reduction that other homeowners received and freeze their tax rate at a lower rate.

The language of Proposition 2 is much more straight-forward and says “The constitutional amendment increasing the amount of the residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxes for public school purposes from $25,000 to $40,000.”

If passed by Texas voters, Proposition 2 would raise Texas’ homestead exemption from $25,000 to $40,000 for school district property taxes, saving an average homeowner around $180 on their annual property tax bill. The amendment requires the state of Texas to make up $600 million annual decrease in school district revenue.

Opponents of these propositions make the argument that they don’t fix the real problem which is that our public schools are largely funded by property taxes. While that’s true these propositions do make the issue slightly less onerous and swing the pendulum back toward the state with regard to the percentage of funding provided by the state versus local property taxes. For the last decade or so, in most districts, the local portion has steadily increased so in that sense these propositions are a welcome reversal.

Monday April 25^th is the first day to early vote and Saturday May 7th is election day, I urge you to make time to vote “For” both these important propositions.

 Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 20, 2022

Republicans the party of fraud, fear, and fascism

The leadership of the modern Republican Party have taken the party down the path of fraud, fear, and fascism. First they use fraud to create scenarios and conspiracy theories on topics that will instill fear in conservative voters. The next step is to blame liberals and Democratic officials and candidates in particular for participating in or enabling the feared behavior. All of this is in aid of winning electoral contests so that the Republican Party retains power in order to do the bidding of the oligarchs that provide their campaign funds and very lucrative jobs when they are out of office.

Republican leaders and media figures peddled non-sense like the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy in an effort to defeat Hillary Clinton. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election Trump made claims that refugees from Central and South America were mostly criminals and we therefore needed a wall on the southern border to protect us. Now, many of those same Republican leaders have added equally absurd, yet even more dangerous hokum such as connecting homosexuality with pedophilia or Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick throwing vulnerable transgender children under the bus by making them scapegoats with their overwrought claims that they somehow threaten to overwhelm high school athletic competition.

Proponents of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory - like Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn Lt. General, U.S. Army ret. falsely claimed that illegally hacked emails between John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and others contained coded messages that connected several high-ranking Democratic Party officials and certain restaurants with an alleged human trafficking and child sex ring. Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. was purportedly the central hub of the conspiracy and holding children in the basement. A North Carolina conservative bought into the conspiracy theory so strongly that he drove to Washington, D.C. and barged into the restaurant whereupon he fired a rifle in an effort to unlock the door to a storage locker that was supposedly the entrance to the non-existent basement. Washington , D. C. police and numerous other respected organizations have thoroughly de-bunked the entire conspiracy theory.

With very few exceptions the people trying to cross the southern border to get into the U.S. are suffering from poverty and violence in their home countries very often caused by drug traffickers that are financed by their customers in the United States. Often the migrants are unaccompanied children who have been sent on their way after being threatened by drug gangs. If Republicans really wanted to do something constructive so that those migrants would stay at home they’d advocate for legalizing all drugs especially marijuana to undercut the finances of the drug gangs. But then, they couldn’t rail at Democrats about open borders or fill up private prisons with men of color who then can’t vote for their opponents or compete for jobs with white men of similar education and skills.

Frankly, there is stronger evidence of a conspiracy to protect pedophiles and groom children within the Catholic Church than there is for gay men but you don’t see Republicans attacking the Catholic Church.

Republican justifications for bill’s restricting transgender students from participating in high school sports largely rely on scare tactics, stereotypes, and unwarranted claims that transgender women have a physiological advantage over cisgender women—despite a complete lack of evidence that transgender sports participation has had any measurable impact on the success of cisgender athletes.

Republican candidates still genuflect to Trump because their voters demand it. The Trump-Putin axis scares me as Trump has continued to speak admiringly of Putin even as Putin endeavors to annex Ukraine through armed invasion.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 13, 2022