Grading Texas

Neglecting health care for kids while boosting the wealthy; how did your representative vote?

Passing that awful tax bill on the eve of the holidays was bad enough, but the majority in Congress compounded the felony by failing to renew the Children’s Health Insurance Program before 2017 drew to a close. A CHIP bill never came to a vote.

That means a huge package of tax cuts and tax breaks for the super-wealthy and what amounts to a private school voucher plan for K-12 are a lock, while the hard-working parents of about 8.9 million low-income American children (almost 400,000 in Texas) still don’t know if they will be able to get basic health care for their kids after existing funding runs out in a few weeks.

Want to do something about it? You can. This is an election year, and here are the members of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House from Texas who voted for the tax bill while putting off the health care needs of children:

Both U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn voted for it. Cornyn won’t be up for re-election until 2020, but Cruz will be on the ballot this year. Cruz not only voted for the tax bill, but he also was the sponsor of the voucher amendment that was tacked on to it. His amendment will allow parents to spend as much as $10,000 per child per year from their tax-advantaged 529 savings accounts for K-12 tuition at religious and private schools. Previously, those accounts were limited to college tuition.

The new tax law also will add more than a trillion dollars to the deficit and potentially jeopardize some crucial programs for middle- and low-income Americans, including Social Security and Medicare, when the bills for the billionaire tax cuts come due in a few years. Here are the U.S. House members from Texas who voted for the new tax law. Some aren’t running for re-election, but most are:

Louie Gohmert (District 1), Ted Poe (District 2), Sam Johnson (District 3), John Ratcliffe (District 4), Jeb Hensarling (District 5), Joe Barton (District 6), John Culberson (District 7), Kevin Brady (District 8), Michael McCaul (District 10), Mike Conaway (District 11), Kay Granger (District 12), Mac Thornberry (District 13), Randy Weber (District 14).

Also, Bill Flores (District 17), Jodey Arrington (District 19), Lamar Smith (District 21), Pete Olson (District 22), Will Hurd (District 23), Kenny Marchant (District 24), Roger Williams (District 25), Michael Burgess (District 26), Blake Farenthold (District 27), John Carter (District 31), Pete Sessions (District 32) and Brian Babin (District 36).

Kevin Brady (District 8) also was the chief House sponsor of the tax law.

If you don’t know who represents you in the U.S. House, go to the link below, fill in your home address and under district type, select “congressional.”

http://www.fyi.legis.state.tx.us/Home.aspx

Elections have consequences, and this new tax law is one of them. So is the neglect of children’s health care. Now, there will be another election, and a chance for change.

Another failing report card for Texas government

U.S. News recently released its “Best States” rankings, and overall Texas ranked poorly, 38^th out of 50, and even worse in education, 41^st, even though our economy ranked sixth and our government was 11^th. What happened?

The short answer is Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and the legislative majority persist in squandering Texas’ resources and opportunities. And the government ranking is misleading.

The quality of Texas government was ranked primarily on process, not results. Texas got high marks for such factors as use of digital technology, balanced budgets, the state credit rating, auditing procedures and public access to information about political fund-raising and lobbyists.

Texas government wasn’t ranked on how poorly it uses the resources generated by the state’s highly-ranked economy (first in GDP growth and fifth in job growth) to improve opportunities for all its citizens. The Legislature always passes a balanced budget because the Texas Constitution requires it. All too often, though, those budgets are balanced by cutting corners.

You may remember that in 2011, during an economic downturn, then-Gov. Rick Perry and the legislative majority balanced the budget by slashing billions of dollars from important public services, including $5.4 billion from education alone, rather than raise revenue. Even with a strong economy now, Abbott and Patrick insisted on leaving billions of dollars in the state’s savings account this year rather than adequately funding services such as education and health care.

U.S. News’ researchers may have been impressed with Texas’ flush stash of cash, but they weren’t impressed with our educational or health care systems, our infrastructure or the opportunities afforded our citizens.

Texas ranked 41^st in education, including 36^th in pre-school enrollment, 43^rd in pre-K quality and 29^th in college readiness. Those are indicators negatively impacted by poor education funding. Poor funding means larger classes, fewer opportunities for teachers to provide one-on-one attention to struggling students, inadequate classroom technology, etc.

In a separate study by the National Education Association, Texas ranked 35^th in state education spending per student, $2,555 below the national average. In contrast, the four highest rated states for education systems in the U.S. News study – Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Connecticut – also ranked in the top 10 for per-student funding.

In other rankings, Texas was 50^th (dead last) in health insurance enrollment, 47^th in health care access, 49^th in overall infrastructure, 21^st in road quality, 50^th in power grid reliability, 24^th in housing affordability, 43^rd in education equality by race and 42^nd in gender equality.

Because of these factors and more, Texas ranked 45^th in its capacity for providing opportunities for all its citizens. That’s the price of electing government officials who are less interested in promoting opportunity for everyone than they are in trying to dictate how people should live their lives.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/texas

The education consequences of electing Ted Cruz

As you may know, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is running for reelection next year, and he will claim to be representing your “best” interests in Washington on just about anything you want to hear, including education. Fortunately, of course, you don’t have to believe him, and you shouldn’t.

For one thing, Cruz voted for that awful tax bill the Senate passed last weekend. (So did Texas Sen. John Cornyn, but he isn’t facing the voters this cycle.) And to make the bill even worse, Cruz sponsored the anti-public education voucher amendment that was added to the measure.

Elections have consequences, folks, and if you are an educator who believed Cruz’s campaign malarkey and voted for him last time, you may want to avoid shooting yourself and your colleagues and students in the foot again next year.

Cruz’s voucher amendment, which passed on a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence, would allow parents to spend as much as $10,000 a year from their special 529 college savings accounts to pay tuition at private K-12 schools. Cruz claimed his amendment would “expand options for parents” and “prioritize the education of the next generation of Americans.”

Baloney.

The new tax break, if it stays in the final version of the bill and becomes law, would primarily benefit wealthier parents while undermining public schools where the vast majority of children in Texas and other states will continue to be educated.

Another bad provision in the bill that could undermine public school funding would curtail the deduction of state and local taxes from the federal income tax returns that you file. The legislative majority in Texas already under-funds our public schools, and this added restriction on federal tax deductions could increase the political incentive of legislators to starve public education even more.

All in all, the Senate tax bill, like its House counterpart, is a blatant scheme to make the richest Americans richer and to heck with just about everyone else. Now, negotiators from the two chambers will meet, mostly in private, to try to reach a compromise to send to President Trump before the end of the year.

The overwhelming majority of Americans will be better off if the effort fails. But if there is going to be a tax bill, educators should demand that one Senate provision remain in the final bill. This provision would allow teachers to deduct as much as $500 a year from their federal income taxes for out-of-pocket expenses on school and classroom supplies.

The present deduction of $250 a year was wiped out in the House version of the bill.

Trump fails to connect with science and Nobel scientists

If you still are able to tolerate childishness in high office or see nothing wrong with the dumbing down of America, you may want to stop reading now. Otherwise, here goes.

I recently learned, courtesy of The New York Times, that President Trump recently broke with another presidential tradition. He didn’t invite the latest American winners of Nobel prizes to the White House. The winners of this year’s Nobels in physics, chemistry, economics and physiology, all Americans, were instead honored at the Swedish Embassy in Washington.

The White House claimed the president’s travel schedule as an excuse. But who knows? As the Times article suggested, maybe the president “isn’t big on research’s value to society.” He, after all, continues to deny the science behind climate change and has advocated budgetary and tax policies to undermine public education.

The Nobel winners apparently weren’t upset at being dissed by the White House.

Biophysicist Joachim Frank, the Nobel laureate in chemistry, said he was “relieved” at not having to visit with Trump. Referring to the other winners, he was quoted, “I strongly believe that as thinking, intelligent people, they will have a similar attitude as I.”

Richard Thaler won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. According to the newspaper article, the Nobel committee said Thaler’s research into human behavior explored “the consequences of limited rationality, social preferences and lack of self-control.”

Almost sounds as if it were a thesis on the Tweeter-in-Chief.

Dear Nobel winners, Mr. Trump has all the brains he needs