Action Update - Issue 54 :: August 30, 2005

Consumers Across the Country Should Also Benefit

By Bill Peacock

For the last eight months Texas has been the major battle ground in the telecom wars with the traditional phone companies and the cable industry going head-to-head over deregulation and access to millions of Texas consumers.

                                  

Industry watchers have kept their eyes on the Lone Star State. Since it is a major market and the home of SBC, whatever happened there was likely to have significant repercussions across the country.

What happened is the state legislature passed a bill deregulating significant portions of the telecom market and making Texas the only state allowing telephone companies to receive a statewide franchise in order to provide new video services that competes with cable.

The cable industry opposed the legislation, pointing out that over the last three decades its companies have gone city-by-city to secure franchises, an expensive and time-consuming process.

They have a valid point. Local governments used their monopoly status to extract whatever they wanted from the cable companies, who had no choice but to pay the cities’ asking price if they wanted to do business.

The solution to this problem, though, was not to subject new entrants to the same onerous regulations, but to create new laws which facilitate entry and lower regulatory costs for all competitors. And that is exactly what happened in Texas.    <continued>

_____________________________________________________________

Why Texas Schools Need the '65% solution'

by Peggy Venable for the Houston Chronicle

Move would translate into $1.6 billion without tax hike

It's a tough pill to swallow: reforming state taxes to increase the state's share of education funding. But it is clear public schools are ailing as test scores fall and many district rankings drop.

While education lobbyists clamored for as much as $6 billion to $8 billion more in education funding, the citizen group Americans for Prosperity in Texas believes that more money won't fix the problem. One symptom of the system's problems is fiscal mismanagement of existing education dollars.

Even the school finance lawsuit currently before the Texas Supreme Court has left taxpayers questioning how our education dollars are being spent. While school districts are using millions of tax dollars to sue the state for more tax dollars, the court heard that Socorro Independent School District justified a waterslide by claiming it lowered dropout rates.                                                                               <continued>

---

He’s Back: Justice Tries His Hand At
Directing Medicaid

by William Lutz, Lone Star Report

What’s the biggest budget driver in Texas government? Health care? Education? Transportation?

Perhaps it’s U.S. Dist.  Judge William Wayne Justice.

For more than two decades, Justice’s orders defined the rules under which Texas could run its prison system. Compliance with Justice’s orders drove the state budget, as lawmakers faced a choice – build more prisons or let the bad guys out of jail early.

Now Justice is trying his hand at Medicaid.

Since 2000, Justice and the Office of the Attorney General have battled over whether the court can dictate how the state’s Medicaid system is run.                  <continued>

_____________________________________________________________