Abbott Fails the People of Texas

Last week Gov. Greg Abbott proved once and for all what a petty, mean-spirited, little man he is by essentially giving notice to several hundred state employees that they’re fired as of September 1^st by vetoing Article X of the budget bill passed by both houses of the state legislature. Abbott announced he would do it in a fit of pique days after House Democrats walked out late on the last day of the session, breaking quorum over the voter suppression bill known as SB7. By vetoing that line item in the budget he is making the workers who clean the capitol, operate the cafeteria, run the parking garage suffer. The veto will hardly be noticeable to the elected members of the state legislature as they only get $500 a month and they all have full time jobs elsewhere. The folks that will hurt the most are the ones that had nothing to do with the politics of the session, they take care of the building and the people, they’re just like you and me.

Abbott also signed two bills into law aimed at strengthening the electric grid and reforming the agencies that regulate it. The bills were a response to a massive winter storm that broke the state’s electric grid, which according to a Buzzfeed investigation, killed as many as 700 Texans. Prior signing the bills, Abbott confidently declared that “everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas.” Last week we learned there are more problems with the grid when statewide notice was sent out requesting that all electricity users take steps to conserve because several generation plants were down with unscheduled repair issues. Nothing in the bills Abbott was so proud of addresses these issues and summer has just begun.

One of the electricity grid bills Abbott signed is SB3 which power generators and transmission line operators to weatherize their facilities. That’s great but the big problem during Snowpocalypse was that natural gas supply disruptions, the law requires only gas facilities deemed to be “critical” to weatherize. The agency responsible for making the determination of what’s critical is the industry-friendly Railroad Commission so we have no reason to be hopeful that they’ll actually select all the necessary infrastructure.

SB3 will take effect in six months so the regulatory agencies have time to work out the details. The catch is that the legislature failed to set a deadline for when regulators must begin actually enforcing the law. House Democrats attempted to remedy that with an amendment to establish a six-month deadline for enforcement after the regulatory agencies create their weatherization rules. The bill’s main author, Representative Chris Paddie, opposed the idea citing “financial and operational concerns,” the amendment was voted down along with another to make penalties mandatory also failed. Does anyone actually believe this legislation will do anything to insure that our electric grid will be better prepared for the next winter storm or hurricane, or extreme high temperatures?

Abbott recently announced that he’s picking up Trump’s ball on the border wall and will use $250 million in state funds to build some of it. He says he’s going to work with the Biden administration to have the previously purchased land returned to the original landowners then negotiate with them to have the state buy that land so he can build his wall.

Greg Abbott has shown he doesn’t care about regular folks, little people, he’s just worried about re-election and his action putting state employees out of work to spite House Democrats last week shows why he must not be.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - June 23, 2021

Our Unjust Tax Code

Bill and Ted both make $100,000 a year, each have a wife who isn’t working so they can stay home with their one year old child. Bill works for a big company and handles their computers and network, sometimes he works 60 hours a week. Ted’s income comes from his stock portfolio. Since they make the same amount of money each year and have the same number of dependents you’d think they would pay the same amount of federal income tax, but you’d be wrong. Ted’s income is taxed at a lower percentage because the federal tax code privileges capital gains with a lower rate. While this has been a problem for decades the Trump tax “reform” of 2017 made it worse. 

Of course much of the rhetoric surrounding work and taxes claims that poor people don’t pay enough taxes and those who get jobless benefits are the problem when in reality it is the very wealthiest among us who not only don’t pay their fair share they use their wealth to actively push to increase the differential. The very wealthy make campaign donations for the maximum allowed by law, then they setup dark money groups to donate more and run their own ads pushing their chosen candidates. The only things the wealthy ask in return for their largesse is that their privileged tax rate continue and the Internal Revenue Service be underfunded so it doesn’t have the staff to audit them and take them to court.

People like you and me, who work hard all day to actually earn our money, pay more in taxes than people who just sit back and collect a check.

Republicans campaigning for midterm elections in 2022 are claiming that the Trump tax cut in 2017 was a great success. They claim wages went up and unemployment went down because the corporate tax cut created a demand for labor that helped disadvantaged groups. The truth is that the unemployment rate has been going down from 2010 to the beginning of the pandemic 10 years later. Nothing remarkable happened in 2017, 2018, or 2019 other than continuing the trend that had been going on for years. 

The 2017 tax law also includes incentives for investing in plants and facilities outside of the United States. Didn’t Republicans claim they were all about “America First”? Those incentives are in the tax code because Republican donors told them to include it. Republicans are not about “America First”, they are about campaign donors first. The only people the Trump tax plan was good for were the small number who fund the political campaigns of the people who voted for it. When pushing the tax bill Republicans claimed that companies that are actually overseas and happen to do incidental business in the United States shouldn’t have to pay taxes. The defined the tax code based such that the higher the percentage of physical stuff a company has outside of the United States the lower taxes they have to pay. That gave every company an incentive to move as much physical plant and equipment overseas as possible.

ProPublica, the non-profit public interest journalism organization, recently published a number of articles on how our tax code and the Internal Revenue Service have been undermined. While Trumps big tax bill was the latest injury Republicans aren’t the only ones who have favored their big campaign donors with tax breaks. On the positive side Joe Biden is pushing to raise taxes on capital gains and revitalize the IRS so that it can audit more of the wealthy people who are not paying their taxes.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - June 16, 2021

Voter Fraud Investigation is a Fraud

As reported in the Houston Chronicle; Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s “office spent nearly twice as much time working on voter fraud cases this year as it did in 2018 — logging more than 22,000 staff hours — yet resolved just 16 prosecutions, half as many as two years ago.” That’s according to records obtained from the agency by nonprofit government watchdog American Oversight.

Everyone prosecuted were Harris County residents who supplied false addresses when they registered to vote. Not a single one served even a day in jail. There were over 11 million votes cast in the presidential election here in Texas so Paxton’s teams found that .00000145% of them were cast by voters registered at the wrong address. If shoplifting and speeding had rates that low we’d hardly ever assign officers to those crimes.

Paxton considers the voter fraud a top priority of his office. Between January and October of 2020 assigned eight additional law enforcement sergeants in addition to the nine already assigned to the election integrity unit and doubled the number of prosecutors to four. Given the pay rates of the attorneys and experienced investigators assigned a conservative estimate is that Paxton spent $750,000 to investigate and prosecute a bunch of nobodies for very minor violations of election law.  That’s like the city assigning a sizable fraction of police officers to catch people speeding less than 5 miles an hour over the posted limit. There is plenty of more important work to be done with that kind of expenditure of Texas taxpayer money.

Like the previous occupant of the White House, Paxton and Gov. Abbott continue to claim that organized voter fraud is rampant and even with massive expenditures of investigative resources they’re unable to provide any proof. Even if Paxton is honest and competent, and I’d argue he’s neither, numerous academic studies and journalistic reviews have also failed to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. Even a wide-ranging investigation of election fraud conducted by the U.S. Justice Department under former Attorney General William Barr in the 2020 elections found no evidence of such fraud. Prior to his resignation Barr publicly admitted that investigators had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

So to be clear, even the Republican attorney general who protected the former president from the Mueller investigation couldn’t gin up a shred of evidence for the big lie his boss and nearly every Republican in office today, except Liz Cheney and a handful of others, continue to extol and use as the excuse for making it harder for people to register to vote and cast their ballot.

If there is no organized voter fraud and elections aren’t being won with fraudulent votes then why is Gov. Abbott so upset that SB7, the omnibus election bill, failed to pass last month? He’s so upset he has threatened to veto the budget line that pays the salaries for the thousand staffers who work full time for our senators and representatives. Making government employees suffer because you don’t like the outcome of the legislative process is a whole new level of childish temper tantrum.

The real reason that Republican leaders like the former president, Gov. Abbott, Paxton and others claim widespread voter fraud is that it provides a fig leaf for their efforts to prevent the voters most likely to vote for Democrats from voting. They know that their policies aren’t popular and that they can’t win when more people vote so their strategy is simply don’t let them vote.

Published in the Seguin Gazette June 9, 2021