The news of Texas covered today includes:
Our Lone Star story of the day: Decades ago Texas’ legislature passed several laws allowing big tax breaks to be handed out by local governments in the state. However, while some of these programs have received much attention and have well defined limits others do not. A major piece in the Houston Chronicle details the problems with Chapter (Local Gov’t Code) 380 and 381 handouts. The lack of limits and transparency is shocking. Senator Bettencourt and others are moving to reign in the abusive programs which, in my opinion, simply let politically connected developers tap the public coffers at the local level.
Our Lone Star story of the day is sponsored by Allied Compliance Services providing the best service in DOT, business and personal drug and alcohol testing since 1995.
The FERC report on Texas’ Big Freeze should be taken with a bit of skepticism. Would FERC, which has long detested Texas having its own intrastate grid with limited federal control, never color its report in any way? And, gas companies sell a commodity to the global market with generators being a specific customer. It seems more appropriate that electric generators themselves should be the parties responsible for ensuring their supply, not the producer of the raw commodity. This is all a bit like making BHP Billiton, or similar, responsible to ensure its mines never have a production or transport problem in order protect a far off steel maker from having production issues due to ore or coke shortages.
Texas unemployment numbers are in (and getting better.)
Much in our border news stack including renewed concern that for all of what looks like state action the border, we are actually doing little but increasing the cost on state taxpayers.
And, other news of Texas.
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