Action Update - Issue 94 : :  March 27, 2007

Conservatives Cringe :

SB 896 Attacks Businesses and Free Markets

"How the legislature proceeds will have implications that go beyond TXU.  While some businesses may be encouraging regulatory intervention, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, they are willing to feed the crocodile simply wanting the crocodile to eat them last."

Testimony by Peggy Venable, director of Americans for Prosperity-Texas House Regulated Industries Committee Hearing on SB 896

We believe that interference with the market could derail Texas’ prosperity.  While well-intentioned, we are concerned that SB 896 introduced by Sen. Troy Fraser (R-Marble Falls) provides the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) with additional administrative authority to review any sales or transactions that would transfer the majority ownership of a public utility to another entity.  The legislation changes the rules mid-stream by changing Texas law retroactively.  It sets a dangerous precedent and would create an anti-business environment where businesses and citizens could question “when is the law the law?”

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Texas Comptroller Susan Combs:  

The Cost of Obesity: Squeezing Texas Employers

During the past 15 years, the share of adult Texans at a normal weight declined rapidly, while the percentage of obese Texans increased. From 1990 to 2005, the percentage of obese adult Texans rose from 12.3 to 27.0 percent. The percentage of normal weight adult Texans plummeted from 57.1 to 35.9 percent.

”At least 50 percent of health care expenditures are lifestyle related and therefore are potentially preventable.” Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, Director of the Institute for Health Policy at The University of Texas School of Public Health.

The Comptroller estimates that costs to Texas businesses due to adult obesity and obesity-related illnesses totaled more than $3.3 billion in 2005, and these costs are growing. Health care expenditures and decreased productivity at work (called “presenteeism”) accounted for most of these costs.

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Competition in Texas Electric Markets

What Texas Did Right and What's Left to Do

by Bill Peacock, Texas Public Policy Foundation

Competition in Texas’ newly deregulated electric market has brought substantial benefits to Texas in only a few years, both in absolute terms and relative to other states. Texas should avoid unpredictable major alterations of the existing market structure that would harm its stability.

Electricity has been the last and most difficult of the great deregulations, thanks to technology, economics and politics. With the complicated politics and physical characteristics of electricity markets, it is little wonder that deregulation has been remarkably successful in some jurisdictions and a near-total failure in others.

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RECOMMENDED READING:

• If we gave the veterans a choice, why not the children?
  90 percent of low-income, minority students given $50 million in privately donatedscholarships over nine years in San Antonio went to college.

• Lawmakers place global warming on the agenda
  A dozen measures, all but one carried solely by Democrats, specifically address the issue of  global warming.

• Isolation of Texas power grid questioned
  Connecting Texas with other states could put pressure on prices on each side whenever a surplus existed.

• State lawmaker: Leave most immigration issues to the feds
  Although once it seemed almost certain that the Texas Legislature was headed for a bruisingshowdown over illegal immigration, a key lawmaker signaled Monday that the place for thatbattle is a national stage.
  

INFORMATION:
Janelle Shepard, Executive Director
Texans for Texas, Inc., 815-A Brazos St #384, Austin, TX 78701-9996.
© 2004 Texans For Texas, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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