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Abbott being Abbott


Mo Horn

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My hope is that there are enough suburban and rural voters and representatives who, despite otherwise being full-fledged MAGA's, will realize there aren't enough (or there aren't any) private schools in their areas who can accommodate new students from the public schools, or whose snowflake kids can't get admitted into the available private schools, and a voucher system will further deplete the resources and competencies of the public schools.  The Texas Monthly article touched on the fact that there are some R's who understand this and aren't on board with vouchers.  But I might be wish-casting to think it'll be enough.

The problem is that the State will recapture more money from liberal big city districts and pas it on to the rural districts. They won’t see a difference at all.
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On 2/6/2023 at 10:37 PM, Satchel said:

An estimated 18% of Texas’ total population was uninsured in 2021, the highest share in the country and double the U.S. uninsured rate of 8.6%.

Add this data to the reams of fact that belie Republican claims they vote for fiscal conservatives. They lie to themselves as easily as they lie to the rest of us. 

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Not really an Abbott thing, but it might as well belong here:

 

https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2023/02/22/texas-esg-policies-cost?utm_campaign=editorial&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

 

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How much does it cost to blacklist America's biggest banks?

Ask Texas, Axios' Kate Marino writes.

The big picture: The state is effectively pulling back from doing business with banks such as J.P.Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup — on the grounds that they are investing in businesses with ESG (environmental, social and governance) policies, upsetting conservative state leaders.

Flashback: Determined to protect the oil and gas industry, state lawmakers demanded in 2021 that firms that "boycott energy companies" be cut off from doing business with Texas.

 

 

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In August, Texas' chief financial officer, Comptroller Glenn Hegar, unveiled a first-ever list of 10 financial firms — many of them heavy hitters — he said fit that bill.

Sen. Ted Cruz has derided ESG policies as "woke" and "not capitalism."

State of play: Texas' anti-ESG policies are costing taxpayers about $416 million per year in the form of higher interest payments on municipal bonds, per a 2022 paper by Wharton Business School assistant professor Daniel Garrett and Federal Reserve economist Ivan Ivanov. The topic was highlighted recently by Bloomberg's Matthew Winkler.

The biggest banks — like Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citibank — charge lower average fees and often have a broader pool of investors, Bloomberg reports. That usually translates to a lower cost of capital for the borrower.

 

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The Teacher Retirement System, Texas' largest public pension, sold positions in more than a half-dozen firms to comply with state law, per a year-end compliance letter obtained by Axios.

Axios has filed a request under the Texas Public Information Act regarding the value of those divestments.

Zoom in: The city of Anna passed over Citigroup for a mandate to lead a bond offering last fall, despite Citi submitting the most attractive bid, financially, Bloomberg reported at the time.

 

 

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Citi offered Anna a rate of 4.215% on bonds totaling about $100 million. Investment bank Robert W. Baird & Co. offered 4.24% — and got the job.

The cost differential to the city of about 20,000 people is $277,334, a city spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Between the lines: The difference in interest rates may seem small — but it adds up.

The impact: Texas has the highest possible credit rating, at AAA.

But on routine borrowings the state is paying 0.19 percentage points more in yield — the equivalent of $1.9 million on every $1 billion of bonds — than California, which has a lower AA rating, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

 

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7 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Not really an Abbott thing, but it might as well belong here:

 

https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2023/02/22/texas-esg-policies-cost?utm_campaign=editorial&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Add it to the “Republicans are idiots to believe they vote for fiscal conservatives” file.

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first...i worked for Hegar prior to retirement and he was actually the only R i voted for in 2018 - the only R i'd voted for in well over a decade - bc i appreciated his management style and i thought he was a reasonable man who seemed at the time to have some real separation between himself and the rightwing cretins elsewhere in state leadership. i have been very disappointed in recent years to see him fall right in line behind the fascists and i sincerely regret my vote. so fuck him.

second... if they fuck up ERS i'm coming back to Texas with a gotdamn flamethrower.

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12 hours ago, mchookem said:

first...i worked for Hegar prior to retirement and he was actually the only R i voted for in 2018 - the only R i'd voted for in well over a decade - bc i appreciated his management style and i thought he was a reasonable man who seemed at the time to have some real separation between himself and the rightwing cretins elsewhere in state leadership. i have been very disappointed in recent years to see him fall right in line behind the fascists and i sincerely regret my vote. so fuck him.

second... if they fuck up ERS i'm coming back to Texas with a gotdamn flamethrower.


he’s a goose stepper like the rest of them 

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8 hours ago, Bullneck said:

Damn, riding the bus is 3x a flight on American Airlines?   Must have a kickback coming from that bus company. 

I don't know if the governor is using the same bus company, but at one point he was using Wynne Transportation. Bedford Wynne, one of the owners was a Trump supporter. If I had the time, I could attempt to track down some contributions via the TEC site, but the largest donors know how to contribute w/o appearing during a simple search. One of the aggie regents some years back donated a million to then governor Perry (prior to then being appointed to the BOR) and it was a devil of a time tracking it down. He did it in $250,000 sums over each quarter for a year and gave it to the PAC Texans for Rick Perry. Won't elaborate further than that on that topic. Wynne raked in $37 million over the last two years I believe I read in that article.

Edited by Mrs Whiggins
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11 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

He makes Perry look like a genius and moderate/centrist at times, and Perry was pushing all kinds of shit, including the Trans-Texas Corridor stuff (that was going to make a lot of Perry donors a lot of money, and even Giuliani was involved).

By comparison, Perry was just a backslapping, backdealing good ol' boy trying to get he and his pals rich.

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10 minutes ago, bolverk said:

By comparison, Perry was just a backslapping, backdealing good ol' boy trying to get he and his pals rich.

He knew how to mostly stay in his lane, and not to try and deliberately fuck over the state to score points with voters who give no shits about him (Abbott has no shame or he would have dropped long ago).

Shit, the TTC was going to fuck over plenty of farmers/ranchers, but you understood that it was about making Perry and Giuliani and the Spanish/European consortium, etc. money.  Sure, this big fucking thing was going to end at the Oklahoma border and just turn into a four-lane highway, but it was going to be grandiose and worth a lot.

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I still think the TTC was a generally good idea. Thru traffic shouldn't be routed into urban areas, but that's exactly what the interstate system is designed to do.

 

Tolls are a problem but we collectively decided sometime in the 1970s or 80s that the government shouldn't pay for infrastructure.

Edited by elfenix
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3 hours ago, elfenix said:

I still think the TTC was a generally good idea. Thru traffic shouldn't be routed into urban areas, but that's exactly what the interstate system is designed to do.

I would have been okay with parts of it, but fucking Rudy Giuliani was knee-deep on both sides (with both TxDot and Cintra/etc.) which made me automatically suspicious, local media was being bought up or bought off along the planned route so that they would be more friendly to it, a lot of famers/ranchers would have been fucked, there was a lot of companies involved that on the surface seemed like a good fit, but it's like "wow that's a lot of Texas money flowing to Europe".

Oh, and they had no real plan for when it got to Oklahoma.  It was just going to stop at the Oklahoma border or turn into just a few highway lanes.  I have Okie relatives that live in some of the areas near that part of the border, and they were tuned into local stuff, and they were always surprised/slightly worried about what would happen if this massive corridor was built from Mexico to Oklahoma and then was dumped onto a four-lane highway.

The thing is, parts of it would have been extremely logical, and could have been used as building blocks for something big and efficient running from Mexico up to the northern US.  We have actual inland truck shipping ports (Perot built one up around Dallas), as well as river ports in Oklahoma that could have been tapped into, and there's plenty of rail traffic, and I-35 runs from South Texas to Minnesota.  

All the pieces were there, but it felt greedy as hell, and it felt like the state was trying to keep people in the dark (Hell, I run into people who are aware of it, but had no idea that people like Giuliani were involved as well as foreign contractors, etc.).

Hell, it might have given us a legitimate shot at solid high-speed rail in the US. 

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7 hours ago, mchookem said:

i mean if this page doesn't perfectly encapsulate just how much of a fucktwat Abbott is, he's got a board full of diehard Longhorns missing the leadership of this guy...

image.png.a7d269abd1039f98d5ed3b1f694afbab.png

 

 

That wall full of books is fake, because... of course it is.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/15/2023 at 3:47 PM, Grade of D as in David said:

We have an education thread? What board?

Are you referring to the teachers fuck their students thread?

Yeah, but they're home-schooled.  Gets real weird in a hurry.  Briscoe Cain clicks there often though, odd.

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