I grew up in Texas during the bipartisan years, and the descent of the state's political leadership into a bunch of cookie-cutter Fox News Republicans makes me really sad. It's also kind of emblematic of the intellectual rot in the GOP. It also weakens both the state and that party. Here's a few scattershot thoughts:
1) Recall that George W. was successor (as governor) to a Democrat, Ann Richards. He had to work with a Democratically controlled legislature. All of that was because the replacement of the Dixiecrats with Republicans and the general Southern shift of the GOP was still in-progress; it took longer in Texas because that state has different dynamics than the pure Old South. As a result, you had period of genuine bipartisan governance in Texas. My hope is that the gradual blue shift of the state might deliver another such period.
2) The bipartisan period owed a lot to the fact that Texas used to have a much stronger libertarian streak in its politics. The government just did less stuff. That could be for ill--hello, pollution--but it could also be for good, in the sense that the current GOP mania for highly intrusive government, i.e. the anti-CRT, anti-mask kind of BS, was checked. As part of both the libertarian and bipartisan stuff, Texas politics had a strong "good governance" streak. Again, this was often in the service of preventing the government from doing stuff, and the state has usually lagged on services. But it also led to things like a solid rainy day fund and a preference for competence over partisan performance in politicians.
3) Under appreciated: the emphasis on low state government control left a lot of space for individual Texas cities and counties to be their own thing. This could be really, really bad: Dallas was essentially a Klan stronghold for big parts of the 20th C.; small Texas towns could be scary racist and corrupt. I once delivered a lawsuit against the sheriff in a small county where we had family (I was a courier and file clerk as my undergrad side job). My dad told me not to mention our name unless asked directly, and that if a cop car tried to pull me over in the county, I should not stop until I got to a public parking lot across the county line. And he was right. Before I could deliver the papers, I had to get them notarized in the county clerk's office. By the time I drove over to the sheriff's office, all the deputies were hanging out in the lobby. The clerk had called ahead. Happily, they just wanted to gawk.
BUT...the lack of central control also left tons of space for liberal places to do their own thing, too. This is how Austin became "Austin." Less well-known, Houston had a surprisingly liberal / cosmopolitan streak, in part because the oil and shipping industries demanded a certain level of it--if you wanted that sweet, sweet Saudi crude, you couldn't ask a sheik to come in the back door and use the crappy water fountain. (One customer at my law firm was literally the Sheik of Qatar, who, hilariously, owned some condos in Houston because that's a good way to park money out of country.) Houston passed ordinances protecting employment for gay people in the '80s, UNDER REAGAN. It wasn't a liberal place, precisely, but it was also not what you think of as a conservative paradise.
4) To see the changes of the 21st C., consider the progression of governors:
George W. Bush was a fairly bipartisan and benign governor. Texas was relatively open and welcoming to immigrants. The state was focused on education. The Bush crew's approach to that problem, including an emphasis on standardized testing, has not aged well, but it was a genuine attempt at improvement, and at the time it was believed to be delivering results. Again: they were likely "wrong," but not in a way that was obvious at the time, and the effort of folks like Karen Hughes was pretty clearly genuine. Bush goes to the Presidency on a campaign of "compassionate conservatism." He spearheads a global AIDS initiative, PEPFAR. I'm a global health person. I think Iraq and Afghanistan ended up being stupid disasters. But PEPFAR has saved, no hyperbole here, millions of people's lives in the developing world, and it is very idiosyncratically a Bush program. It would probably not have happened otherwise.
(Also, no one cares about it because of all the other disasters, which: fair. They were disasters. And a lot of the Bushies, starting with Cheney, were straight-up villains and clowns.)
Bush is replaced by Rick Perry. Perry is more GOP-ish. He is also demonstrably more corrupt; despite never having held a job other than as a politician and coming from poverty, he eventually leaves office as a millionaire thanks to his side hustle as a land speculator that just "happens" to deliver absurdly lucrative profits on deals cut in the Austin area. He oversees a GOP-controlled legislature best remembered for the antics of Tom DeLay, who makes a play to do an off-year gerrymander of the state to buttress GOP power in Congress. DeLay eventually goes to jail. BUT...Perry does remain open to immigration. He initially continues on the some of the "compassionate conservative" stuff. This eventually blows his chance at becoming the GOP presidential nominee (it hurt that he was kind of dumb--"oops"--but his immigration openness had already killed his chances at that point).
Perry is replaced by Greg Abbott. You know Greg Abbott from Fox News. The legislature is busy passaging messaging bills. The state power grid has collapsed multiple times. Abbott called on the legislature to pass messaging bills. Abbott's AG (elected separately, but still), is under Federal investigation, and he's only the tip of the corruption iceberg. That's okay, though, because the legislature is going to do some anti-abortion stuff. Abbott is going to build the wall. HE'S GOING TO FUND IT WITH THAT RAINY DAY FUND I MENTIONED. Also, the state now has incredibly high Covid numbers, and the health system is beyond capacity and edging towards collapse. Abbott's response: special legislative session to do some voter restrictions. Oh, and executive orders against mask mandates that even the state's GOP-controlled Supreme Court can't get totally behind.
Basically, the party has descended into a corrupt clown show. It's really depressing. It's one of the major reasons why I have never, not even once, thought that it would be good to move back to Texas. I love my old state, but at this point seeing what is going on there just makes me sad. (And it's hard for me not to assume that, despite its many natural advantages, enough corruption is eventually going to kill the golden goose.)
The Richards > GWB > Perry > Abbott decline of governance in Texas has been absolutely heartbreaking. My first political memory was the governor's race between Ann Richards and Clayton Williams, and how even though the state had shifted away from the Democrats, Willians was such an absolute scumbag that Richards was able to pull off the win. I wonder if we would have seen the same result if we had today's media environment back then.
I'm so envious of that gentile descent. Mississippi (where I have friends and some family) has been far more corrupt and fallen far further, faster than Texas. Yet Mississippi Republicans still blame the "Dems" for all their problems even though they have been in solid control for a long, long time.
Hilariously, I was chalking up "Gentile" as some weird usage to indicate "mixed," assuming you meant the two parties and the bipartisan era, so I'm a bigger idiot.
I feel like the people who died in the freeze and the people who are currently unable to get beds in Texas ICUs probably disagree with you. OTOH, the people fleeing fire in CA probably agree with you. It's the usual tangle of good and bad.
My assessment of CA is complicated by the fact that I'm trained in environmental history, so I look at it as a water-sucking desert where people shouldn't live long-term owing to the problem of drought. But I would say the same of big portions of Texas, and add to it the disastrously poor water management that has flooded out people in my parents' neighborhood three times in the past ten years.
But sure, repeat those CA talking points. I'm from Texas, so I haven't just heard'em--I've said'em, back when I was a conservative kid dreaming of becoming what Paul Ryan actually became. (Hugest moment of my life as a young conservative: meeting Dan Quayle! THE Dan Quayle! VP of these United States!)
The biggest advantage of that rail map is that, by making College Station a major hub, it will appeal to all the Aggie alums who are a vital state constituency. On the other hand, by skipping Waco it will terribly upset all the Baylor alums who are another major constituency among state government. If it ever got to a floor debate in the Texas House that debate would be possibly the most vicious in the state’s history.
Yeah, the eminent domain fights around rail lines can get absolutely insane. Texas Central Railroad has had to deal with a ton of it already for their one line. BNSF still has to run their freight lines right through downtown Austin because they haven't been able to acquire to let them bypass the city. I don't think it's insurmountable, though, if there is enough political will.
I was surprised to learn that Texas population is remarkably urban compared to its reputation. 74% of the population lives on 4% of the land and 88% of the population live in the metros areas. If the urban and suburban decide something, rural populations are along for the ride.
This is a bit of lies through statistics. Texas is gigantic and west and north Texas are completely empty. 4% of Texas is still 10,743 square miles, slightly larger than Massachusetts.
As far as people living in metro areas, this is true. Bryan/College Station for example is not rural, it's not even small town anymore with a combined population of I'd guess over 200,000. It's also getting much less conservative and is home to a gigantic prominent research university.
But it's still built with a ton of sprawl. Car culture is very deeply embedded. There are major economic links to agriculture and strong cultural ideals about rural areas. Eminent domain complaints are going to go a long ways as far as attitudes towards projects like this. They're not going to become urban commuters overnight.
4% of Texas is slightly larger than Massachusetts at 10,743 square miles.
74% of Texas population is also 21.5 million people, roughly 3 times the population of Massachusetts so a population density of about 2 thousand people per square mile. So I'm saying that the population of Texas lives in mostly densely populated areas surrounded by enormous amounts of mostly empty land. I don't understand how this is lying through statistics so much as it simply is surprising given Texas' general reputation.
Sure, and there's lot of parts of western Massachusetts that don't have a lot of people as well. My point is that 4% of Texas is still gigantic, and if you start playing the game of "well it's *actually* dense if you cut out all the parts where people don't live" you're muddying the picture rather than clarifying.
The other part of my comment is to warn against presuming too much of a pro-transit political identity just because a lot of people live in metros. You wouldn't presume that California's Inland Empire is rabidly pro-train just because a lot of Democrats live there and it's a metro area.
It clearly needs to happen within a few years of Texas's entry into the SEC, so the alums will be distracted in the heady afterglow of getting the Texas/A&M game back.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Texas Central Railroad, which is building the Houston to Dallas leg of your proposed map essentially according to your design philosophy: owned by a private company using Japanese technology and a European operator.
They're a little behind schedule but look much more promising than other American regional rail projects. Joe Biden endorsed it while VP, the Trump administration paid lip service to it, and hey, we're hopefully about to get a big infrastructure bill passed! I'm hoping it works well and the model is extended to Austin (where I live and is currently planning a major light rail expansion) and San Antonio.
Also surprised at no mention of this, it seems to be “real” and moving forward, if somewhat behind schedule. Biggest mistake of Texas HSR seems to be not putting the midpoint stop in College Station, I’m baffled by that one.
I know you're really big on fast grants*, but it's not the best way to fund science. I suspect the flaw in your thinking is the idea that scientists are sitting around with great ideas and then have to fight through a bureaucratic nightmare to get it funded years later, after which they can execute their still-great ideas. But what really happens is we have half-formed notions of what we want to do that the grant writing forces us to sharpen and flesh out. So though it's long and sometimes frustrating, the NIH grant review process has consistently made my science better - more rigorous and more impactful.
*I submitted for one in the first week and didn't get it. As expected, when the science review is not rigorous, reviewers tend to fall back on other metrics, like if the applicant is at Harvard or Stanford (I say with a bit of envy). I can assure you, the big labs were not hurting for money anyway.
Some amount of it is certainly helpful in terms of fleshing out project ideas.
But given how competitive these grants are, and how many great ideas can't get funded, what I hear from my partner and others that are constantly in the NSF game (I can't speak to NIH) is that so much of it comes down to anticipating the stylistic quirks that will be off-putting to some random person on the committee. Since they can only fund a tiny fraction of the well-qualified and promising ideas, anything that anyone on the committee gives as a strike against something ends up being disqualifying. Thus, researchers have to spend a lot of time and effort anticipating the idiosyncrasies of the committee members, and the committee spends a lot of time and effort exercising those idiosyncrasies, at no real benefit (and sometimes real cost because researchers cut out some controversial ideas about negative temperature or whatever to avoid offending someone on the committee).
If you could just replace the last few hours of committee arguing with a lottery among the short list that is left, you would save time and effort for both applicants and the committee, and possibly even get better projects. You'd still have to flesh things out enough to get the benefits you're looking for, but not spend the hours ironing out anything that some insider could find controversial.
I don't disagree with your specific points about reviewers, and in fact, I have a NSF proposal I need to revise and resubmit because they didn't appreciate its brilliance! But NSF funding rates are in the 20s (percentile), hardly a tiny fraction (although this varies by division). I'm not sure a lottery that, say, funds half the proposals up to the 50th percentile will be very popular. The lottery idea is more appropriate for something like NCI (National Cancer Institute) at NIH, where the paylines are always in the single digits.
Negative temperature - one of the weirder things I ever learned about in my stat mech class, although it's really just a case where the formal definition diverges from the intuitive one.
Sometimes it's much worse. When Congress opened the floodgates on quantum computing funding, everyone and their dog jumped in --- often with half-baked ideas. There was so much money to go around that plenty of garbage proposals got funded.
I agree with this, although I would spin it a different way- it's more that PIs are under so much pressure to optimize for getting grants that the whole exercise starts to diverge from "is this a brilliant idea that deserves funding" into buzzword maximization.
The basic issue is that grant review committees are extremely limited in their ability to carefully consider the merits of proposed research- they don't have much time to think about any particular proposal in depth, there are tons of parochial/personal conflicts that get in the way, and even if you get someone to think about your proposal the match between the expertise of the reviewer and the application is pretty hit-or-miss. That suggests to me that there is a real benefit to having a pass/fail + lottery approach when we talk about adding more cash to research.
I sympathize with the skepticism. My experience with biomedical grant approval is that the committee would vote to approve almost anything that wasn’t blatantly unethical but only a small proportion (15%?) would be graded high enough to be funded. This way they could argue that 85% or whatever of “approved” research wasn’t being funded and guilt Congress into appropriating more funding. In my experience, however, at least half of what was “approved” was pretty bad; some could be salvaged with more work but a lot was just plain dumb.
Yeah, there's an element of that, of course; you have to have preliminary data for most proposals, after all. For example, when I decided to work on a new system, it took us a few years of unfunded work on the side before we had enough to get a grant for it. And part of what we're doing with that grant is method development (applied to the system we're funded to work on!), which will help us with the next proposal.
Your second point seems to support mine though; too much easy money and a lack of a rigorous review process means a lot of it will be wasted.
I know little about Texas, but my cliche image of the state suggests that they should be fully onboard (pun intended) for a >200 mph train as described here. Beyond the beneficial economic effects, super fast bullet trains would just be a great look and -- best of all -- man, the bragging rights they would have over my California and its disaster of an HSR.
Can we get the high speed rail line from Austin to College Station working by the time UT joins the SEC? That would make an interesting ride on Thanksgiving (or the day after) when the two schools start playing again.
The Welch Foundation (https://www.welch1.org/grants-programs/research-grants) already gives $80,000 annual grants to chemistry professors located in the state of Texas - basically half of the departments at UT, A&M, and Rice have them, and these grants are used as a recruiting tool by the universities (because it's basically free money that you can't get if you take a job in Seattle or Chicago or Boston). Having a more general Texas-only grant, open to fields outside of chemistry, would be a similarly big recruiting tool.
That language about "not in Austin, Houston, or Dallas" seems like something the College Station (and Waco and Lubbock) legislators could get behind. While there would probably be a few people at UTEP and UTRGV and maybe Texas Christian University that would be able to get these grants, it would basically all go to A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor faculty.
That, and the dream of Making College Station a Station Again makes this sound like the ideal platform for someone wanting to be the next Rick Perry (first Aggie governor).
While we're on the dreaming, can we get the Union Pacific track connecting College Station and Bryan to run a local light rail, and rezone all the empty industrial land along Finfeather Road to allow massive car-free student housing?
There's definitely a role for a bit of easy money without too many strings. As my lab grows, it's increasingly difficult to keep everyone paid from federal grants alone just due to timing (they all start and end at different times). Having some funds with fewer restrictions can help bridge gaps between other grants and also give you some room to develop new ideas.
Growing up in Bryan/College Station, I'd really doubt the local population would utilize the station very much, particularly considering it will likely be a 30 minute ride to the station, plus boarding, traveling, dealing with navigating Houston without a car. The outskirts of Houston are just over an hour away by car!
I'd expect Texas A&M would offer bus service to the station, particularly during semester breaks. It might get infrequent utilization from College Station to Dallas, and you might see a community of Houston commuters pop up close to the station (if the Houston terminus is convenient).
B/CS to Houston would be mainly used by students I would think (as long as the Houston Metro extends a light rail line to the station, which I believe they're planning to do), and Houston to B/CS route would be huge on game day, but I think you're right that this leg would be relatively low-use otherwise. However, I do think that locals would use hypothetical routes to Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio pretty frequently (especially since the stations in those cities would likely be walking distance to the main visitor attractions).
But I think the bigger thing is probably the connections between the big cities.
I wonder if there would be a market for high-rise condos above the station - certainly many university-affiliated people would be happy to live there for easy getaways, but I wonder if there would be some work-from-home Texans who wouldn't mind living near a campus in exchange for having quick access to all the cities.
Absolutely. My above comment was mainly to add context on the local B/CS utilization. I see a lot of potential of the Houston/Dallas link. I'd expect both cities to try and support inter-system connections, financing allowing. I hope it works out and the regional network is extended to the rest of central Texas.
I write this as a former Houstonian who now lives in the East. Isn't the argument against a Texas train the simple fact that you have to get around once you get off the thing? Could any city in the state build a transit network big enough to deal with all the people who might be getting off a train several times a day? Not saying it can't be done, just that building the rail system might turn out to be the easy part.
Build a nice big parking garage next to the station and let a storey each to Hertz, Avis and Enterprise.
There are a lot of people that fly from Houston to Dallas - if I'm reading the BTS data tables correctly, about 1.3 million in 2019 (and presumably a similar number in the opposite direction). All of those are people who arrived without a car. The train will be much faster than flying (if for no other reason than the absence of TSA security theater).
Add on however many can be attracted from driving, which won't be insignificant.
Sure, if you can build a real transit network, even better. But Alon Levy is correct that these cities are big enough that there will be plenty of customers even without.
I really feel the advent of ride-hailing services makes this a much more manageable issue. (Especially once the US auto fleet is substantially further along on the transition to EVs, though the country is (shockingly!) foot-dragging on this last part, from what I can see).
Houston and Dallas both have light rail that I've heard is reasonable and city governments that would likely support linking to the regional rail, financing allowing.
The Department of Energy Office of Science has a similar budget to the NSF ($7 billion vs. $8.2 billion in 2020) and funds a similar amount of research. When this is overlooked, we end up with things like senators claiming the DOE doesn't do any science or need any more funding during the committee debate on the Endless Frontier act.
Tennessee hasn’t expanded Medicaid! Back in the late 90s/early 00s there was a big managed care experiment here that expanded subsidized healthcare, but the Dem governor cut the rolls substantially in the early 00s. The legislature flipped around 2006, so there wasn’t support for ACA Medicaid expansion. The previous governor, Bill Haslam, was supportive of expansion under a weird subsidy plan but it never got enough legislative support to pass, and the current governor is opposed to expansion. Unlike a number of other R states, Tennessee doesn’t have strong voter initiatives, so Medicaid is unlikely to be expanded anytime soon.
>>Then Elena Kagan and John Roberts seem to have made a weird deal whereby Roberts would join the liberal justices in upholding the ACA individual mandate if Kagan would join the conservatives in ruling that Medicaid expansion couldn’t be mandatory.
I appreciate the efforts to emphasize the politics of judicial decisionmaking, but this is overly conspiratorial. First of all, Roberts already had the votes, so he didn't need Kagan to do anything. Second, the seven justice majority on the issue (Breyer joined as well) was pretty well justified on the merits. Withholding *all* Medicaid funds if states didn't adopt the proposed expansion is, in fact, a pretty coercive exercise of the spending power. You could argue the other side as well, but the outcome can be understood easily without resorting to realpolitik.
As to the meat of the article, this all sounds great, but I'm left wondering why a Republican would want to do these things. All the states that have adopted independent redistricting commissions are blue or trending-blue (Arizona may be the closest to Texas), or are those weird-western-small-states that love being ahead of the curve on women's suffrage and fair elections. Republicans don't like independent redistricting because they love kicking ass in elections, and a wonky argument about Beto O'Rourke's performance in the 2018 midterms in state house districts doesn't really persuade. Republicans still won the state house, and the lesson might instead be that even with major demographic shifts over eight years and historic Democratic turnout, the gerrymander was solid enough to *still* win.
And as to zoning and high-speed rail, this assumes that it's to Republicans political advantage to make these better places to live. The preemption laws are usually about totally symbolic stuff or businessman red-meat that is much more viscerally "pro-business" (e.g., low minimum wage) than they are about actual governance. And as much as that sucks for good governance, I don't see a Republican candidate getting very far with his proposal to make liberal, cosmopolitan cities more liberal and cosmopolitan while also making them more affordable, nicer places to live. Conservatives beating up on Austin is a classic trope in Texas politics, and it's good for Republicans politically if Austin continues to have high homelessness and shitty traffic.
I think this is a good agenda for a moderate Democrat who wants to run statewide, but I don't see a contemporary Republican going anywhere with this.
The idea that Congress can't attach "too many" conditions to money it gives States is completely made up by the Court - it's nowhere in the Spending Clause.
If Congress had announced it was phasing out Medicaid entirely that would have been within its rights. And if Congress also announced it was phasing in a new program for States - MedicalAid - that happened to have more strings than the old terminated Medicaid program that would have been okay too.
Probably the reason the doctrine survives is it's somewhat neutral in application and increases the Court's power either way - today it might benefit Republicans, tomorrow Democrats, but always the Court. But it's not defensible under anything that fairly counts as legal reasoning, because it's so standardless and arbitrary and untethered to anything in the Constitution.
>>>Withholding *all* Medicaid funds if states didn't adopt the proposed expansion is, in fact, a pretty coercive exercise of the spending power.<<<
Requiring a modest state-level contribution (10% max IIRC) ended up being an enormously stupid own goal by Democrats, in the end. How much would it have cost the federal government over the long term to simply pay for 100% instead of 90%? Not much.
While there are definitely headwinds against high-speed rail (it would be a massive blow to Southwest Airlines, who makes a pretty penny on its flights between those cities), I don't think that the Republicans' need to stick it to the cities would be one of them. The Red/Blue division in Texas is much less a fight between the urban and rural areas, and much more a fight of the cities vs the suburbs. So a nice high-speed rail route from DFW to Houston would also be a benefit to people in the deep-red suburbs of Colleyville and Sugar Land. But by that same rule, overruling local zoning to make things more dense is about as poisonous as you can get to folks in the suburbs.
Yeah, I also could see conventional Texas Republican would support high speed rail in isolation. My point was more geared to the idea that a Republican could build party support around a policy agenda (of which high-speed rail is a part) that's focused on growing Texas cities. While it might be true that most Texans live in urban/suburban areas, as someone who grew up in San Antonio and the hill country, I can attest that many conservative Texas suburbanites like to view themselves as more country than they really are (see: "guys driving gas-guzzling trucks as a lifestyle choice that has nothing to do with their actual job”). The anti-urbanism runs deep.
I think these are all good ideas that could be part of a winning platform in present-day Texas. I just believe it's more likely to come from a Democrat who's willing to compromise on social issues to get elected.
Can you explain how the Red/Blue division is really about cities vs the suburbs? That's not what the voting maps look like to me: i see very red rural counties and very blue cities with suburbs in between. But that's the birds-eye view of a guy who lives a thousand miles away
Part of the issue is needing to account for the fact that, because Texas is so sprawling, there are entire counties that are basically suburbs (Denton & Collin County are part of the DFW metroplex, Williamson County is primarily a suburb of Austin, etc.) There's a lot more blue on the 2020 presidential map, which might be part of a real shift or might be because Trump really underperformed.
Like, here's an example of two comparable suburbs. The DFW suburb of North Richland Hills in Texas and the Chicago suburb of Palatine in Illinois. Both comparable population size, similar median household income, both just outside of blue cities. North Richland Hills went between +13 for Trump in its "bluest" precinct and +39 for Trump in its reddest (city-level data was unavailable, so had to go by precinct). Meanwhile, Palatine went +20 for Biden.
Short story is, only 15% of Texas population is considered rural - compared to a national average of about 20%. The actual urban vote is pretty Democratic so the suburbs lean right to give Republican's their advantage in the state.
I've seen the argument made that Texas' countryside is less populated than those of most of the rest of the US, and that the GOP is still stronger in the suburbs than elsewhere to continue to win despite that.
Never looked at it seriously enough to know whether this is true or not.
NYT's 2020 Obscenely Detailed Election Map says maybe? I don't know enough about the geography of Texas' major cities to speak to it, but their burbs seem less blue than the suburbs of places I know well, like Philadelphia, DC, or Chicago.
Yeah, as a native Texan living in the north I can confirm anecdotally that the generic suburbanite in Texas (or other parts of the south) is just more conservative than a northern suburbanite with an otherwise similar lifestyle. I don't really have a good answer for why that's the case, but I think it does come down to cultural/religious factors more than any stance on economic issues.
It seems telling that as GA, CO, VA, and AZ (read, Atlanta, Denver, DC, and Phoenix) have boomed they've blued much more quickly than TX, which has boomed just as much in Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Austin.
The only place that seems to behave similarly is North Carolina.
It's interesting to pair them up; NC and GA have grown by similar amounts, as have TX and AZ, but their political outcomes have been quite different.
I think the fact that Texas hasn't gone blue in proportion to its growth might also be some self-selection of those who decide that Texas is the place they should move. The 'Alamosexual' phenomenon is real (https://twitter.com/cd_hooks/status/966519007238066176?s=20), and you'll often see recent arrivals who are a lot more conservative than the locals. The recent arrivals are also more likely to be Fox News type conservatives, while Texas-born conservatives can usually be slotted into one of three categories "Church Folk", "Gun Folk", "Owns a Car Dealership".
Texas has a process whereby people can contest the county assessor's valuation of their property each year, to ensure they aren't overtaxed. I definitely worry right now that this is a way of empowering rich people to decrease their property tax burden, while giving counties cover for over-taxing property of anyone who doesn't have the skills needed to do the contestation process.
I worry that this sort of system might be even worse with a land value assessment system - though it's also quite possible that it will avoid problems. (My house dropped in value by 50% in the first tax year, and then returned to the value I paid for it the next year, because the county assessor didn't have any idea how to assess a modern attached townhouse in walking distance of downtown, but I suppose the land would be easier to assess accurately, since it's the same as the single-family homes across the street.)
I'm shocked to hear a county assessor decreased the assessment value. I thought that was just a theoretical possibility, not something that could actually happen in real life.
The county assessor never reduced the assessment value - at the time we bought the house, there were no comparable properties in the county, so the very first assessment was half what we paid for it (i.e., they assessed a modernist townhome within walking distance of downtown at the price-per-square-foot of a suburban McMansion because the only new builds in town up until that point were suburban McMansions) but a year later, when the other units in the building had sold, they assessed our property at the price-per-square-foot the others in the building sold at. (This lack of comparable properties actually made it a bit difficult to get the mortgage at first, and the bank had to do something they probably considered shady internally to approve a mortgage of the size we took out.)
I tend to think the appeals process could be less easily abused under a LVT. (I agree that it really privileges rich homeowners, but I think pretty much every state has an appeal/contestation process; to not have one could be a due process issue.) The issue with property assessment as it's done now is that it's basically an appraisal process. And appraisals are inherently subjective and easily abused. Under a LVT it would be pretty hard to argue that two parcels of land next to each other have a different value, and you also wouldn't have difficulty distinguishing between the value of residential, commercial, and industrial properties (a big issue for a long time in Cook County/Chicago has been underassessment of commercial properties relative to residential).
The technical detail I'm less familiar with is how you go about actually setting the land value in the first place. With residential property sales in a modestly sized market, it's conceptually easy to figure out how much a given piece of real estate is worth. But, sort of by definition, there isn't a large market for vacant land in densely populated areas.
I don't know either TBH. I'll have to talk to a friend of mine, he's a tax assessor in a New Jersey city that could charitably be described as "blighted."
Not to mention the rich person's scam of giving away a conservation easement. Suggest the same for anyone living in a doublewide with a view of a tree.
Given where we live, I'd have thought you see the advantages of relying more heavily on income and consumption taxes in rapidly developing/growing/gentrifying places?
Philly's property taxes are proportionally much lower than those of Boston, DC, or NYC, which means that even as land values go up, long-time residents aren't forced out by tax bills unless they get an offer they don't *want* to turn down.
Sure, in downturns that reliance on income taxes does hurt, but I think the long-term needs of a mostly-poor citizenry outweigh the occasional panicked meeting of the City Council to beg for money from DC and Harrisburg.
I won't get into land value vs. income/consumption taxes; I haven't studied it enough. Between traditional property tax and land value, though, it's pretty much a no-brainer to me. (I invoke "The Land" mostly as a joke; I'm not actually a single-tax Georgist.) On the Philly-specific front, actually, adopting an LVT structure would make moot all the arguments we've had back and forth about the 10-year tax abatement by giving it to everyone.
That seems reasonable, though obviously whether we've struck exactly the right balance is a fair subject for debate. The biggest advocate of rebalancing in favor of property taxes is probably Domb, and even he doesn't think we should get rid of our other taxes. I'm agnostic, just so long as I still have a job lol.
(I do think we should look into restructuring/reforming the taxes, as they are rather confusing, but that may be difficult because what we can impose is in large part dictated by stuff like the tax uniformity provision in the state constitution and other impositions from Harrisburg. Like, a graduated income tax would open up lots of possibilities, but we can't do that because uniformity.)
Domb’s stance is intriguing simply because he stands to hurt himself quite a bit by bringing it to fruition, but at the end of the day I think I mostly subscribe to the logic I outlined elsewhere. A tax take balanced more heavily on income taxes than real estate taxes helps the poor and working class in a rapidly gentrifying city.
As for a graduated income tax, I’m not sure there’s much point when it’s not being implemented statewide, even if we were allowed. Mobility for the wealthy is such that many would end up in nice old mansions in Upper Merion instead of nice old mansions in Chestnut Hill if we went too far down that road, unless it were the whole state doing it.
I'm curious how important you think it is to balance state income variability in that process? My understanding is that property tax intake has much lower intake variability than income taxes. I know Philly and California aren't the same, but my understanding of California is that their tax intake is quite variable because they rely so much on income taxes relative to property taxes and their income tax is very progressive. So that when Silicon Valley is doing well (2020) they are flush, but when IPOs and such slow down, their intake can drop dramatically.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I'm not saying that a graduated tax would be a *good* idea, but it's annoying we can't even consider it. It's the most obvious example of the constraints placed on the City's taxing power, the rest get kinda esoteric.
Yeah, if you want to keep it administratively simple, just say that they have to use the federal tax brackets so they can't go inventing their own thresholds.
That wouldn't work, "uniformity" is a weird provision in the PA state constitution that has been interpreted to prohibit both the state and municipalities from imposing graduated taxes of any kind, as well as having some other effects (e.g. you can't tax commercial property at a higher rate than residential). It's called "uniformity" because the language mandates that the rate of taxation of a tax be "uniform" throughout the jurisdiction to which it applies.
As I understand it, the difference between LVT and property taxes is whether you include the assessment of improvements on the land (houses, pools, etc.)
Why would you say its better to exclude improvements when calculating the tax?
There's two axes here, one economic, one urbanist/neighborhoody.
The economic axis is Adam Smith's old observation that a tax on "ground rents"--that is, a land-value tax--is the least-distortionary tax available. This is because the supply of land is, to a first approximation, completely fixed; Dubai and the Netherlands aside, you can't really create more of it, and you certainly can't do it cheaply. On the other hand, the amount of *buildings* on a given parcel can be quite variable, especially now we have elevators. Taxing the improvements discourages development, which depresses the overall amount of economic activity in an area. But taxing just the value of the land doesn't do that, at least not nearly as much. (At least, this is the economic theory as I understand it, I could be wrong).
The urbanist/neighborhoody axis is this: Property taxes penalize good/consciencious property owners and reward bad/lazy ones. A property owner who keeps their house or storefront or what have you looking nice and in good repair pays *more* in standard property tax than their neighbor who let the facade crumble and the yard get overrun by weeds. Property tax particularly incentivizes landlords to put a bare minimum of effort into maintaining their properties, since doing so increases their tax burden and narrows their profit margins. A land-value tax, by taxing the properties the same, eliminates this malign incentive, which hopefully leads to nicer neighborhoods and better housing for tenants.
Thanks for sharing. Definitely not an expert, but most of the variation in appraisals that I've seen come down to location much more than upkeep. Doesn't change the underlying point though.
As I understand it, the advantages of a George-ite land tax system are A) removes/reduces the disincentive to improve property and B) discourages amassing of large land holdings. Obviously the rate of taxation is a critical detail. I think to make such a system work the government would need act as a land bank to take custody of no-longer-wanted land parcels.
The land-bank portion is important. The interesting thing is that many cities have built the infrastructure to do this already (they already have the land bank), so there's nothing stopping them really. Also, relating this to Texas, that can be the state-government policy to get municipalities to switch to LVT: "Adopt an LVT basis and the state will take care of unwanted properties, you won't bear that cost." Given Texas's hot real estate market, I can't imagine the burden to the state would be that large, and the state can take advantage in the long term.
True, but with standard property tax there's a tax advantage to keeping the empty plots empty, whereas with LVT you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't try and make some use of your land. I can confirm from conversations with several of the kinds of landlords who prevail in Tioga and East Germantown that not wanting to pay higher property taxes is a major reason they don't keep up their properties. (I don't handle City REA directly, but I deal with these guys all the time because they also neglect other City taxes and fees that I do handle.)
I think they're just idiots, myself. There are enough of them that they could singlehandedly accelerate the ongoing gentrification of Germantown and get some decent rent increases in if they acted like they want their property values to go up.
God knows we're doing our best to gradually polish up all of our properties.
The other thing is the interaction of LVT and upzoning. If your property gets upzoned then your LVT goes up. Your property tax only goes up when you actually build that bigger building.
This means that having a single family home on land that could permit a missing-middle apartment block is expensive in taxes. Doing the same in a conventional property tax regime isn't.
Would absolutely read a slow boring series on how to Yglesify every state in the union
The Neoliberal Shill version of Sufjan Stevens's Fifty State Project
This might be the closest to home a slow boring comment has EVER hit.
Except it was all a lie and there was never a plan to do the full 50 :( :( :( Matt already has 2!
You mean he doesn’t have an album’s worth of material on North Dakota he’s been waiting to release?
Sufjan made it to two as well, so we'll see if Matty Yg can beat him
"Better Know A State!"
Then he could put Setbacks and other zoning requirements On Notice.
(Ignore this post, young people.)
I grew up in Texas during the bipartisan years, and the descent of the state's political leadership into a bunch of cookie-cutter Fox News Republicans makes me really sad. It's also kind of emblematic of the intellectual rot in the GOP. It also weakens both the state and that party. Here's a few scattershot thoughts:
1) Recall that George W. was successor (as governor) to a Democrat, Ann Richards. He had to work with a Democratically controlled legislature. All of that was because the replacement of the Dixiecrats with Republicans and the general Southern shift of the GOP was still in-progress; it took longer in Texas because that state has different dynamics than the pure Old South. As a result, you had period of genuine bipartisan governance in Texas. My hope is that the gradual blue shift of the state might deliver another such period.
2) The bipartisan period owed a lot to the fact that Texas used to have a much stronger libertarian streak in its politics. The government just did less stuff. That could be for ill--hello, pollution--but it could also be for good, in the sense that the current GOP mania for highly intrusive government, i.e. the anti-CRT, anti-mask kind of BS, was checked. As part of both the libertarian and bipartisan stuff, Texas politics had a strong "good governance" streak. Again, this was often in the service of preventing the government from doing stuff, and the state has usually lagged on services. But it also led to things like a solid rainy day fund and a preference for competence over partisan performance in politicians.
3) Under appreciated: the emphasis on low state government control left a lot of space for individual Texas cities and counties to be their own thing. This could be really, really bad: Dallas was essentially a Klan stronghold for big parts of the 20th C.; small Texas towns could be scary racist and corrupt. I once delivered a lawsuit against the sheriff in a small county where we had family (I was a courier and file clerk as my undergrad side job). My dad told me not to mention our name unless asked directly, and that if a cop car tried to pull me over in the county, I should not stop until I got to a public parking lot across the county line. And he was right. Before I could deliver the papers, I had to get them notarized in the county clerk's office. By the time I drove over to the sheriff's office, all the deputies were hanging out in the lobby. The clerk had called ahead. Happily, they just wanted to gawk.
BUT...the lack of central control also left tons of space for liberal places to do their own thing, too. This is how Austin became "Austin." Less well-known, Houston had a surprisingly liberal / cosmopolitan streak, in part because the oil and shipping industries demanded a certain level of it--if you wanted that sweet, sweet Saudi crude, you couldn't ask a sheik to come in the back door and use the crappy water fountain. (One customer at my law firm was literally the Sheik of Qatar, who, hilariously, owned some condos in Houston because that's a good way to park money out of country.) Houston passed ordinances protecting employment for gay people in the '80s, UNDER REAGAN. It wasn't a liberal place, precisely, but it was also not what you think of as a conservative paradise.
4) To see the changes of the 21st C., consider the progression of governors:
George W. Bush was a fairly bipartisan and benign governor. Texas was relatively open and welcoming to immigrants. The state was focused on education. The Bush crew's approach to that problem, including an emphasis on standardized testing, has not aged well, but it was a genuine attempt at improvement, and at the time it was believed to be delivering results. Again: they were likely "wrong," but not in a way that was obvious at the time, and the effort of folks like Karen Hughes was pretty clearly genuine. Bush goes to the Presidency on a campaign of "compassionate conservatism." He spearheads a global AIDS initiative, PEPFAR. I'm a global health person. I think Iraq and Afghanistan ended up being stupid disasters. But PEPFAR has saved, no hyperbole here, millions of people's lives in the developing world, and it is very idiosyncratically a Bush program. It would probably not have happened otherwise.
(Also, no one cares about it because of all the other disasters, which: fair. They were disasters. And a lot of the Bushies, starting with Cheney, were straight-up villains and clowns.)
Bush is replaced by Rick Perry. Perry is more GOP-ish. He is also demonstrably more corrupt; despite never having held a job other than as a politician and coming from poverty, he eventually leaves office as a millionaire thanks to his side hustle as a land speculator that just "happens" to deliver absurdly lucrative profits on deals cut in the Austin area. He oversees a GOP-controlled legislature best remembered for the antics of Tom DeLay, who makes a play to do an off-year gerrymander of the state to buttress GOP power in Congress. DeLay eventually goes to jail. BUT...Perry does remain open to immigration. He initially continues on the some of the "compassionate conservative" stuff. This eventually blows his chance at becoming the GOP presidential nominee (it hurt that he was kind of dumb--"oops"--but his immigration openness had already killed his chances at that point).
Perry is replaced by Greg Abbott. You know Greg Abbott from Fox News. The legislature is busy passaging messaging bills. The state power grid has collapsed multiple times. Abbott called on the legislature to pass messaging bills. Abbott's AG (elected separately, but still), is under Federal investigation, and he's only the tip of the corruption iceberg. That's okay, though, because the legislature is going to do some anti-abortion stuff. Abbott is going to build the wall. HE'S GOING TO FUND IT WITH THAT RAINY DAY FUND I MENTIONED. Also, the state now has incredibly high Covid numbers, and the health system is beyond capacity and edging towards collapse. Abbott's response: special legislative session to do some voter restrictions. Oh, and executive orders against mask mandates that even the state's GOP-controlled Supreme Court can't get totally behind.
Basically, the party has descended into a corrupt clown show. It's really depressing. It's one of the major reasons why I have never, not even once, thought that it would be good to move back to Texas. I love my old state, but at this point seeing what is going on there just makes me sad. (And it's hard for me not to assume that, despite its many natural advantages, enough corruption is eventually going to kill the golden goose.)
The Richards > GWB > Perry > Abbott decline of governance in Texas has been absolutely heartbreaking. My first political memory was the governor's race between Ann Richards and Clayton Williams, and how even though the state had shifted away from the Democrats, Willians was such an absolute scumbag that Richards was able to pull off the win. I wonder if we would have seen the same result if we had today's media environment back then.
Born with a silver spoon in his mouth!
I'm so envious of that gentile descent. Mississippi (where I have friends and some family) has been far more corrupt and fallen far further, faster than Texas. Yet Mississippi Republicans still blame the "Dems" for all their problems even though they have been in solid control for a long, long time.
Took me a moment to realize typo. Scratched head trying to understand the Gentile descent of Texas
lol...in my defense...I'm an idiot.
Hilariously, I was chalking up "Gentile" as some weird usage to indicate "mixed," assuming you meant the two parties and the bipartisan era, so I'm a bigger idiot.
All that and still WAY better than what's going on in CA
I feel like the people who died in the freeze and the people who are currently unable to get beds in Texas ICUs probably disagree with you. OTOH, the people fleeing fire in CA probably agree with you. It's the usual tangle of good and bad.
My assessment of CA is complicated by the fact that I'm trained in environmental history, so I look at it as a water-sucking desert where people shouldn't live long-term owing to the problem of drought. But I would say the same of big portions of Texas, and add to it the disastrously poor water management that has flooded out people in my parents' neighborhood three times in the past ten years.
But sure, repeat those CA talking points. I'm from Texas, so I haven't just heard'em--I've said'em, back when I was a conservative kid dreaming of becoming what Paul Ryan actually became. (Hugest moment of my life as a young conservative: meeting Dan Quayle! THE Dan Quayle! VP of these United States!)
California has 10 million more people than Texas with almost 100k less square miles. It's just a different place.
The biggest advantage of that rail map is that, by making College Station a major hub, it will appeal to all the Aggie alums who are a vital state constituency. On the other hand, by skipping Waco it will terribly upset all the Baylor alums who are another major constituency among state government. If it ever got to a floor debate in the Texas House that debate would be possibly the most vicious in the state’s history.
I grew up in College Station, don't underestimate how much people in rural Texas hate eminent domain.
Yeah, the eminent domain fights around rail lines can get absolutely insane. Texas Central Railroad has had to deal with a ton of it already for their one line. BNSF still has to run their freight lines right through downtown Austin because they haven't been able to acquire to let them bypass the city. I don't think it's insurmountable, though, if there is enough political will.
I was surprised to learn that Texas population is remarkably urban compared to its reputation. 74% of the population lives on 4% of the land and 88% of the population live in the metros areas. If the urban and suburban decide something, rural populations are along for the ride.
This is a bit of lies through statistics. Texas is gigantic and west and north Texas are completely empty. 4% of Texas is still 10,743 square miles, slightly larger than Massachusetts.
As far as people living in metro areas, this is true. Bryan/College Station for example is not rural, it's not even small town anymore with a combined population of I'd guess over 200,000. It's also getting much less conservative and is home to a gigantic prominent research university.
But it's still built with a ton of sprawl. Car culture is very deeply embedded. There are major economic links to agriculture and strong cultural ideals about rural areas. Eminent domain complaints are going to go a long ways as far as attitudes towards projects like this. They're not going to become urban commuters overnight.
4% of Texas is slightly larger than Massachusetts at 10,743 square miles.
74% of Texas population is also 21.5 million people, roughly 3 times the population of Massachusetts so a population density of about 2 thousand people per square mile. So I'm saying that the population of Texas lives in mostly densely populated areas surrounded by enormous amounts of mostly empty land. I don't understand how this is lying through statistics so much as it simply is surprising given Texas' general reputation.
Sure, and there's lot of parts of western Massachusetts that don't have a lot of people as well. My point is that 4% of Texas is still gigantic, and if you start playing the game of "well it's *actually* dense if you cut out all the parts where people don't live" you're muddying the picture rather than clarifying.
The other part of my comment is to warn against presuming too much of a pro-transit political identity just because a lot of people live in metros. You wouldn't presume that California's Inland Empire is rabidly pro-train just because a lot of Democrats live there and it's a metro area.
""well it's *actually* dense if you cut out all the parts where people don't live" "
Isn't that like saying Canada doesn't need to worry about COVID because it's population density is so low.
Ok... but
http://i1.wp.com/metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/canada-population-line-map.png
True but don’t underestimate how much Texas alums will hate it either.
It clearly needs to happen within a few years of Texas's entry into the SEC, so the alums will be distracted in the heady afterglow of getting the Texas/A&M game back.
I think I speak for everyone when I say, Fuck Baylor.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Texas Central Railroad, which is building the Houston to Dallas leg of your proposed map essentially according to your design philosophy: owned by a private company using Japanese technology and a European operator.
They're a little behind schedule but look much more promising than other American regional rail projects. Joe Biden endorsed it while VP, the Trump administration paid lip service to it, and hey, we're hopefully about to get a big infrastructure bill passed! I'm hoping it works well and the model is extended to Austin (where I live and is currently planning a major light rail expansion) and San Antonio.
Also surprised at no mention of this, it seems to be “real” and moving forward, if somewhat behind schedule. Biggest mistake of Texas HSR seems to be not putting the midpoint stop in College Station, I’m baffled by that one.
I know you're really big on fast grants*, but it's not the best way to fund science. I suspect the flaw in your thinking is the idea that scientists are sitting around with great ideas and then have to fight through a bureaucratic nightmare to get it funded years later, after which they can execute their still-great ideas. But what really happens is we have half-formed notions of what we want to do that the grant writing forces us to sharpen and flesh out. So though it's long and sometimes frustrating, the NIH grant review process has consistently made my science better - more rigorous and more impactful.
*I submitted for one in the first week and didn't get it. As expected, when the science review is not rigorous, reviewers tend to fall back on other metrics, like if the applicant is at Harvard or Stanford (I say with a bit of envy). I can assure you, the big labs were not hurting for money anyway.
Some amount of it is certainly helpful in terms of fleshing out project ideas.
But given how competitive these grants are, and how many great ideas can't get funded, what I hear from my partner and others that are constantly in the NSF game (I can't speak to NIH) is that so much of it comes down to anticipating the stylistic quirks that will be off-putting to some random person on the committee. Since they can only fund a tiny fraction of the well-qualified and promising ideas, anything that anyone on the committee gives as a strike against something ends up being disqualifying. Thus, researchers have to spend a lot of time and effort anticipating the idiosyncrasies of the committee members, and the committee spends a lot of time and effort exercising those idiosyncrasies, at no real benefit (and sometimes real cost because researchers cut out some controversial ideas about negative temperature or whatever to avoid offending someone on the committee).
If you could just replace the last few hours of committee arguing with a lottery among the short list that is left, you would save time and effort for both applicants and the committee, and possibly even get better projects. You'd still have to flesh things out enough to get the benefits you're looking for, but not spend the hours ironing out anything that some insider could find controversial.
I don't disagree with your specific points about reviewers, and in fact, I have a NSF proposal I need to revise and resubmit because they didn't appreciate its brilliance! But NSF funding rates are in the 20s (percentile), hardly a tiny fraction (although this varies by division). I'm not sure a lottery that, say, funds half the proposals up to the 50th percentile will be very popular. The lottery idea is more appropriate for something like NCI (National Cancer Institute) at NIH, where the paylines are always in the single digits.
Negative temperature - one of the weirder things I ever learned about in my stat mech class, although it's really just a case where the formal definition diverges from the intuitive one.
"what really happens is we have half-formed notions of what we want to do that the grant writing forces us to sharpen and flesh out."
That's a very optimistic view of grant writing. My experience is much more like http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431
Sometimes it's much worse. When Congress opened the floodgates on quantum computing funding, everyone and their dog jumped in --- often with half-baked ideas. There was so much money to go around that plenty of garbage proposals got funded.
I agree with this, although I would spin it a different way- it's more that PIs are under so much pressure to optimize for getting grants that the whole exercise starts to diverge from "is this a brilliant idea that deserves funding" into buzzword maximization.
The basic issue is that grant review committees are extremely limited in their ability to carefully consider the merits of proposed research- they don't have much time to think about any particular proposal in depth, there are tons of parochial/personal conflicts that get in the way, and even if you get someone to think about your proposal the match between the expertise of the reviewer and the application is pretty hit-or-miss. That suggests to me that there is a real benefit to having a pass/fail + lottery approach when we talk about adding more cash to research.
I sympathize with the skepticism. My experience with biomedical grant approval is that the committee would vote to approve almost anything that wasn’t blatantly unethical but only a small proportion (15%?) would be graded high enough to be funded. This way they could argue that 85% or whatever of “approved” research wasn’t being funded and guilt Congress into appropriating more funding. In my experience, however, at least half of what was “approved” was pretty bad; some could be salvaged with more work but a lot was just plain dumb.
Yeah, there's an element of that, of course; you have to have preliminary data for most proposals, after all. For example, when I decided to work on a new system, it took us a few years of unfunded work on the side before we had enough to get a grant for it. And part of what we're doing with that grant is method development (applied to the system we're funded to work on!), which will help us with the next proposal.
Your second point seems to support mine though; too much easy money and a lack of a rigorous review process means a lot of it will be wasted.
I know little about Texas, but my cliche image of the state suggests that they should be fully onboard (pun intended) for a >200 mph train as described here. Beyond the beneficial economic effects, super fast bullet trains would just be a great look and -- best of all -- man, the bragging rights they would have over my California and its disaster of an HSR.
Can we get the high speed rail line from Austin to College Station working by the time UT joins the SEC? That would make an interesting ride on Thanksgiving (or the day after) when the two schools start playing again.
I love red state FanFic
The Welch Foundation (https://www.welch1.org/grants-programs/research-grants) already gives $80,000 annual grants to chemistry professors located in the state of Texas - basically half of the departments at UT, A&M, and Rice have them, and these grants are used as a recruiting tool by the universities (because it's basically free money that you can't get if you take a job in Seattle or Chicago or Boston). Having a more general Texas-only grant, open to fields outside of chemistry, would be a similarly big recruiting tool.
That language about "not in Austin, Houston, or Dallas" seems like something the College Station (and Waco and Lubbock) legislators could get behind. While there would probably be a few people at UTEP and UTRGV and maybe Texas Christian University that would be able to get these grants, it would basically all go to A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor faculty.
That, and the dream of Making College Station a Station Again makes this sound like the ideal platform for someone wanting to be the next Rick Perry (first Aggie governor).
While we're on the dreaming, can we get the Union Pacific track connecting College Station and Bryan to run a local light rail, and rezone all the empty industrial land along Finfeather Road to allow massive car-free student housing?
There's definitely a role for a bit of easy money without too many strings. As my lab grows, it's increasingly difficult to keep everyone paid from federal grants alone just due to timing (they all start and end at different times). Having some funds with fewer restrictions can help bridge gaps between other grants and also give you some room to develop new ideas.
Growing up in Bryan/College Station, I'd really doubt the local population would utilize the station very much, particularly considering it will likely be a 30 minute ride to the station, plus boarding, traveling, dealing with navigating Houston without a car. The outskirts of Houston are just over an hour away by car!
I'd expect Texas A&M would offer bus service to the station, particularly during semester breaks. It might get infrequent utilization from College Station to Dallas, and you might see a community of Houston commuters pop up close to the station (if the Houston terminus is convenient).
B/CS to Houston would be mainly used by students I would think (as long as the Houston Metro extends a light rail line to the station, which I believe they're planning to do), and Houston to B/CS route would be huge on game day, but I think you're right that this leg would be relatively low-use otherwise. However, I do think that locals would use hypothetical routes to Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio pretty frequently (especially since the stations in those cities would likely be walking distance to the main visitor attractions).
But I think the bigger thing is probably the connections between the big cities.
I wonder if there would be a market for high-rise condos above the station - certainly many university-affiliated people would be happy to live there for easy getaways, but I wonder if there would be some work-from-home Texans who wouldn't mind living near a campus in exchange for having quick access to all the cities.
Absolutely. My above comment was mainly to add context on the local B/CS utilization. I see a lot of potential of the Houston/Dallas link. I'd expect both cities to try and support inter-system connections, financing allowing. I hope it works out and the regional network is extended to the rest of central Texas.
I write this as a former Houstonian who now lives in the East. Isn't the argument against a Texas train the simple fact that you have to get around once you get off the thing? Could any city in the state build a transit network big enough to deal with all the people who might be getting off a train several times a day? Not saying it can't be done, just that building the rail system might turn out to be the easy part.
Build a nice big parking garage next to the station and let a storey each to Hertz, Avis and Enterprise.
There are a lot of people that fly from Houston to Dallas - if I'm reading the BTS data tables correctly, about 1.3 million in 2019 (and presumably a similar number in the opposite direction). All of those are people who arrived without a car. The train will be much faster than flying (if for no other reason than the absence of TSA security theater).
Add on however many can be attracted from driving, which won't be insignificant.
Sure, if you can build a real transit network, even better. But Alon Levy is correct that these cities are big enough that there will be plenty of customers even without.
I really feel the advent of ride-hailing services makes this a much more manageable issue. (Especially once the US auto fleet is substantially further along on the transition to EVs, though the country is (shockingly!) foot-dragging on this last part, from what I can see).
Houston and Dallas both have light rail that I've heard is reasonable and city governments that would likely support linking to the regional rail, financing allowing.
Texas Central Railroad out here like "we exist"
The Department of Energy Office of Science has a similar budget to the NSF ($7 billion vs. $8.2 billion in 2020) and funds a similar amount of research. When this is overlooked, we end up with things like senators claiming the DOE doesn't do any science or need any more funding during the committee debate on the Endless Frontier act.
Tennessee hasn’t expanded Medicaid! Back in the late 90s/early 00s there was a big managed care experiment here that expanded subsidized healthcare, but the Dem governor cut the rolls substantially in the early 00s. The legislature flipped around 2006, so there wasn’t support for ACA Medicaid expansion. The previous governor, Bill Haslam, was supportive of expansion under a weird subsidy plan but it never got enough legislative support to pass, and the current governor is opposed to expansion. Unlike a number of other R states, Tennessee doesn’t have strong voter initiatives, so Medicaid is unlikely to be expanded anytime soon.
Thanks, Drew, I was just about to write something very like this. You're also a Tennessean?
>>Then Elena Kagan and John Roberts seem to have made a weird deal whereby Roberts would join the liberal justices in upholding the ACA individual mandate if Kagan would join the conservatives in ruling that Medicaid expansion couldn’t be mandatory.
I appreciate the efforts to emphasize the politics of judicial decisionmaking, but this is overly conspiratorial. First of all, Roberts already had the votes, so he didn't need Kagan to do anything. Second, the seven justice majority on the issue (Breyer joined as well) was pretty well justified on the merits. Withholding *all* Medicaid funds if states didn't adopt the proposed expansion is, in fact, a pretty coercive exercise of the spending power. You could argue the other side as well, but the outcome can be understood easily without resorting to realpolitik.
As to the meat of the article, this all sounds great, but I'm left wondering why a Republican would want to do these things. All the states that have adopted independent redistricting commissions are blue or trending-blue (Arizona may be the closest to Texas), or are those weird-western-small-states that love being ahead of the curve on women's suffrage and fair elections. Republicans don't like independent redistricting because they love kicking ass in elections, and a wonky argument about Beto O'Rourke's performance in the 2018 midterms in state house districts doesn't really persuade. Republicans still won the state house, and the lesson might instead be that even with major demographic shifts over eight years and historic Democratic turnout, the gerrymander was solid enough to *still* win.
And as to zoning and high-speed rail, this assumes that it's to Republicans political advantage to make these better places to live. The preemption laws are usually about totally symbolic stuff or businessman red-meat that is much more viscerally "pro-business" (e.g., low minimum wage) than they are about actual governance. And as much as that sucks for good governance, I don't see a Republican candidate getting very far with his proposal to make liberal, cosmopolitan cities more liberal and cosmopolitan while also making them more affordable, nicer places to live. Conservatives beating up on Austin is a classic trope in Texas politics, and it's good for Republicans politically if Austin continues to have high homelessness and shitty traffic.
I think this is a good agenda for a moderate Democrat who wants to run statewide, but I don't see a contemporary Republican going anywhere with this.
The idea that Congress can't attach "too many" conditions to money it gives States is completely made up by the Court - it's nowhere in the Spending Clause.
If Congress had announced it was phasing out Medicaid entirely that would have been within its rights. And if Congress also announced it was phasing in a new program for States - MedicalAid - that happened to have more strings than the old terminated Medicaid program that would have been okay too.
Probably the reason the doctrine survives is it's somewhat neutral in application and increases the Court's power either way - today it might benefit Republicans, tomorrow Democrats, but always the Court. But it's not defensible under anything that fairly counts as legal reasoning, because it's so standardless and arbitrary and untethered to anything in the Constitution.
>>>Withholding *all* Medicaid funds if states didn't adopt the proposed expansion is, in fact, a pretty coercive exercise of the spending power.<<<
Requiring a modest state-level contribution (10% max IIRC) ended up being an enormously stupid own goal by Democrats, in the end. How much would it have cost the federal government over the long term to simply pay for 100% instead of 90%? Not much.
While there are definitely headwinds against high-speed rail (it would be a massive blow to Southwest Airlines, who makes a pretty penny on its flights between those cities), I don't think that the Republicans' need to stick it to the cities would be one of them. The Red/Blue division in Texas is much less a fight between the urban and rural areas, and much more a fight of the cities vs the suburbs. So a nice high-speed rail route from DFW to Houston would also be a benefit to people in the deep-red suburbs of Colleyville and Sugar Land. But by that same rule, overruling local zoning to make things more dense is about as poisonous as you can get to folks in the suburbs.
Yeah, I also could see conventional Texas Republican would support high speed rail in isolation. My point was more geared to the idea that a Republican could build party support around a policy agenda (of which high-speed rail is a part) that's focused on growing Texas cities. While it might be true that most Texans live in urban/suburban areas, as someone who grew up in San Antonio and the hill country, I can attest that many conservative Texas suburbanites like to view themselves as more country than they really are (see: "guys driving gas-guzzling trucks as a lifestyle choice that has nothing to do with their actual job”). The anti-urbanism runs deep.
I think these are all good ideas that could be part of a winning platform in present-day Texas. I just believe it's more likely to come from a Democrat who's willing to compromise on social issues to get elected.
Can you explain how the Red/Blue division is really about cities vs the suburbs? That's not what the voting maps look like to me: i see very red rural counties and very blue cities with suburbs in between. But that's the birds-eye view of a guy who lives a thousand miles away
Part of the issue is needing to account for the fact that, because Texas is so sprawling, there are entire counties that are basically suburbs (Denton & Collin County are part of the DFW metroplex, Williamson County is primarily a suburb of Austin, etc.) There's a lot more blue on the 2020 presidential map, which might be part of a real shift or might be because Trump really underperformed.
Like, here's an example of two comparable suburbs. The DFW suburb of North Richland Hills in Texas and the Chicago suburb of Palatine in Illinois. Both comparable population size, similar median household income, both just outside of blue cities. North Richland Hills went between +13 for Trump in its "bluest" precinct and +39 for Trump in its reddest (city-level data was unavailable, so had to go by precinct). Meanwhile, Palatine went +20 for Biden.
Short story is, only 15% of Texas population is considered rural - compared to a national average of about 20%. The actual urban vote is pretty Democratic so the suburbs lean right to give Republican's their advantage in the state.
I've seen the argument made that Texas' countryside is less populated than those of most of the rest of the US, and that the GOP is still stronger in the suburbs than elsewhere to continue to win despite that.
Never looked at it seriously enough to know whether this is true or not.
NYT's 2020 Obscenely Detailed Election Map says maybe? I don't know enough about the geography of Texas' major cities to speak to it, but their burbs seem less blue than the suburbs of places I know well, like Philadelphia, DC, or Chicago.
Yeah, as a native Texan living in the north I can confirm anecdotally that the generic suburbanite in Texas (or other parts of the south) is just more conservative than a northern suburbanite with an otherwise similar lifestyle. I don't really have a good answer for why that's the case, but I think it does come down to cultural/religious factors more than any stance on economic issues.
It seems telling that as GA, CO, VA, and AZ (read, Atlanta, Denver, DC, and Phoenix) have boomed they've blued much more quickly than TX, which has boomed just as much in Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Austin.
The only place that seems to behave similarly is North Carolina.
It's interesting to pair them up; NC and GA have grown by similar amounts, as have TX and AZ, but their political outcomes have been quite different.
I think the fact that Texas hasn't gone blue in proportion to its growth might also be some self-selection of those who decide that Texas is the place they should move. The 'Alamosexual' phenomenon is real (https://twitter.com/cd_hooks/status/966519007238066176?s=20), and you'll often see recent arrivals who are a lot more conservative than the locals. The recent arrivals are also more likely to be Fox News type conservatives, while Texas-born conservatives can usually be slotted into one of three categories "Church Folk", "Gun Folk", "Owns a Car Dealership".
No plan on how to make the Cowboys great again?
Right now the plan to make the Cowboys great again has just one line: "Pray that Jerry Jones is not actually immortal, and will one day leave us."
I think we need companion pieces for NY, CA, and FL
I am disappointed that your tax recommendations did not include adopting/encouraging municipalities to adopt a land value tax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fzk_Sc4bBY
The land! The land! 'Twas God who made the land!
The land! The land! The ground on which we stand!
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
God gave the land to the people!
Texas has a process whereby people can contest the county assessor's valuation of their property each year, to ensure they aren't overtaxed. I definitely worry right now that this is a way of empowering rich people to decrease their property tax burden, while giving counties cover for over-taxing property of anyone who doesn't have the skills needed to do the contestation process.
I worry that this sort of system might be even worse with a land value assessment system - though it's also quite possible that it will avoid problems. (My house dropped in value by 50% in the first tax year, and then returned to the value I paid for it the next year, because the county assessor didn't have any idea how to assess a modern attached townhouse in walking distance of downtown, but I suppose the land would be easier to assess accurately, since it's the same as the single-family homes across the street.)
I'm shocked to hear a county assessor decreased the assessment value. I thought that was just a theoretical possibility, not something that could actually happen in real life.
The county assessor never reduced the assessment value - at the time we bought the house, there were no comparable properties in the county, so the very first assessment was half what we paid for it (i.e., they assessed a modernist townhome within walking distance of downtown at the price-per-square-foot of a suburban McMansion because the only new builds in town up until that point were suburban McMansions) but a year later, when the other units in the building had sold, they assessed our property at the price-per-square-foot the others in the building sold at. (This lack of comparable properties actually made it a bit difficult to get the mortgage at first, and the bank had to do something they probably considered shady internally to approve a mortgage of the size we took out.)
I tend to think the appeals process could be less easily abused under a LVT. (I agree that it really privileges rich homeowners, but I think pretty much every state has an appeal/contestation process; to not have one could be a due process issue.) The issue with property assessment as it's done now is that it's basically an appraisal process. And appraisals are inherently subjective and easily abused. Under a LVT it would be pretty hard to argue that two parcels of land next to each other have a different value, and you also wouldn't have difficulty distinguishing between the value of residential, commercial, and industrial properties (a big issue for a long time in Cook County/Chicago has been underassessment of commercial properties relative to residential).
The technical detail I'm less familiar with is how you go about actually setting the land value in the first place. With residential property sales in a modestly sized market, it's conceptually easy to figure out how much a given piece of real estate is worth. But, sort of by definition, there isn't a large market for vacant land in densely populated areas.
Assuming there's a reasonable amount of new build, you can do sale price minus construction cost.
I don't know either TBH. I'll have to talk to a friend of mine, he's a tax assessor in a New Jersey city that could charitably be described as "blighted."
There're only two left really. So is he across the river and down or across the river and up? : )
There's a shiny dome.
Wait… They moved South Bend to New Jersey?
Not to mention the rich person's scam of giving away a conservation easement. Suggest the same for anyone living in a doublewide with a view of a tree.
Yeah, there's more consistency for neighboring parcels. Interesting local perspective!
Given where we live, I'd have thought you see the advantages of relying more heavily on income and consumption taxes in rapidly developing/growing/gentrifying places?
Philly's property taxes are proportionally much lower than those of Boston, DC, or NYC, which means that even as land values go up, long-time residents aren't forced out by tax bills unless they get an offer they don't *want* to turn down.
Sure, in downturns that reliance on income taxes does hurt, but I think the long-term needs of a mostly-poor citizenry outweigh the occasional panicked meeting of the City Council to beg for money from DC and Harrisburg.
I won't get into land value vs. income/consumption taxes; I haven't studied it enough. Between traditional property tax and land value, though, it's pretty much a no-brainer to me. (I invoke "The Land" mostly as a joke; I'm not actually a single-tax Georgist.) On the Philly-specific front, actually, adopting an LVT structure would make moot all the arguments we've had back and forth about the 10-year tax abatement by giving it to everyone.
I’ll buy that, if we’re basically turning the existing real estate tax into a pure land tax.
I just think there are advantages to the current balance between property tax and other taxes as key income streams for the city.
That seems reasonable, though obviously whether we've struck exactly the right balance is a fair subject for debate. The biggest advocate of rebalancing in favor of property taxes is probably Domb, and even he doesn't think we should get rid of our other taxes. I'm agnostic, just so long as I still have a job lol.
(I do think we should look into restructuring/reforming the taxes, as they are rather confusing, but that may be difficult because what we can impose is in large part dictated by stuff like the tax uniformity provision in the state constitution and other impositions from Harrisburg. Like, a graduated income tax would open up lots of possibilities, but we can't do that because uniformity.)
Domb’s stance is intriguing simply because he stands to hurt himself quite a bit by bringing it to fruition, but at the end of the day I think I mostly subscribe to the logic I outlined elsewhere. A tax take balanced more heavily on income taxes than real estate taxes helps the poor and working class in a rapidly gentrifying city.
As for a graduated income tax, I’m not sure there’s much point when it’s not being implemented statewide, even if we were allowed. Mobility for the wealthy is such that many would end up in nice old mansions in Upper Merion instead of nice old mansions in Chestnut Hill if we went too far down that road, unless it were the whole state doing it.
I'm curious how important you think it is to balance state income variability in that process? My understanding is that property tax intake has much lower intake variability than income taxes. I know Philly and California aren't the same, but my understanding of California is that their tax intake is quite variable because they rely so much on income taxes relative to property taxes and their income tax is very progressive. So that when Silicon Valley is doing well (2020) they are flush, but when IPOs and such slow down, their intake can drop dramatically.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I'm not saying that a graduated tax would be a *good* idea, but it's annoying we can't even consider it. It's the most obvious example of the constraints placed on the City's taxing power, the rest get kinda esoteric.
Yeah, if you want to keep it administratively simple, just say that they have to use the federal tax brackets so they can't go inventing their own thresholds.
That wouldn't work, "uniformity" is a weird provision in the PA state constitution that has been interpreted to prohibit both the state and municipalities from imposing graduated taxes of any kind, as well as having some other effects (e.g. you can't tax commercial property at a higher rate than residential). It's called "uniformity" because the language mandates that the rate of taxation of a tax be "uniform" throughout the jurisdiction to which it applies.
As I understand it, the difference between LVT and property taxes is whether you include the assessment of improvements on the land (houses, pools, etc.)
Why would you say its better to exclude improvements when calculating the tax?
There's two axes here, one economic, one urbanist/neighborhoody.
The economic axis is Adam Smith's old observation that a tax on "ground rents"--that is, a land-value tax--is the least-distortionary tax available. This is because the supply of land is, to a first approximation, completely fixed; Dubai and the Netherlands aside, you can't really create more of it, and you certainly can't do it cheaply. On the other hand, the amount of *buildings* on a given parcel can be quite variable, especially now we have elevators. Taxing the improvements discourages development, which depresses the overall amount of economic activity in an area. But taxing just the value of the land doesn't do that, at least not nearly as much. (At least, this is the economic theory as I understand it, I could be wrong).
The urbanist/neighborhoody axis is this: Property taxes penalize good/consciencious property owners and reward bad/lazy ones. A property owner who keeps their house or storefront or what have you looking nice and in good repair pays *more* in standard property tax than their neighbor who let the facade crumble and the yard get overrun by weeds. Property tax particularly incentivizes landlords to put a bare minimum of effort into maintaining their properties, since doing so increases their tax burden and narrows their profit margins. A land-value tax, by taxing the properties the same, eliminates this malign incentive, which hopefully leads to nicer neighborhoods and better housing for tenants.
Thanks for sharing. Definitely not an expert, but most of the variation in appraisals that I've seen come down to location much more than upkeep. Doesn't change the underlying point though.
As I understand it, the advantages of a George-ite land tax system are A) removes/reduces the disincentive to improve property and B) discourages amassing of large land holdings. Obviously the rate of taxation is a critical detail. I think to make such a system work the government would need act as a land bank to take custody of no-longer-wanted land parcels.
The land-bank portion is important. The interesting thing is that many cities have built the infrastructure to do this already (they already have the land bank), so there's nothing stopping them really. Also, relating this to Texas, that can be the state-government policy to get municipalities to switch to LVT: "Adopt an LVT basis and the state will take care of unwanted properties, you won't bear that cost." Given Texas's hot real estate market, I can't imagine the burden to the state would be that large, and the state can take advantage in the long term.
But in urban areas having a property tax already does this as the value of the land is assessed for empty plots.
Unless you make a LVT truly punitive, you're not going to change the reality of land speculation in, say, Tioga or East Germantown.
True, but with standard property tax there's a tax advantage to keeping the empty plots empty, whereas with LVT you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't try and make some use of your land. I can confirm from conversations with several of the kinds of landlords who prevail in Tioga and East Germantown that not wanting to pay higher property taxes is a major reason they don't keep up their properties. (I don't handle City REA directly, but I deal with these guys all the time because they also neglect other City taxes and fees that I do handle.)
We don't reassess that freaking often, lol.
I think they're just idiots, myself. There are enough of them that they could singlehandedly accelerate the ongoing gentrification of Germantown and get some decent rent increases in if they acted like they want their property values to go up.
God knows we're doing our best to gradually polish up all of our properties.
The other thing is the interaction of LVT and upzoning. If your property gets upzoned then your LVT goes up. Your property tax only goes up when you actually build that bigger building.
This means that having a single family home on land that could permit a missing-middle apartment block is expensive in taxes. Doing the same in a conventional property tax regime isn't.