Editorial Roundup: Texas
The Daily Sentinel. December 29, 2023.
Editorial: Don’t drink and drive on New Year’s Eve or ever
The worst ways to ring in the new year are in a jail cell, a hospital bed or a funeral home because of misguided decisions to drink and drive.
New Year’s Eve is Sunday, and it’s got the reputation of being the booziest holiday of the year, but the same description could be applied throughout the Christmas season.
Texas overall has a drinking and driving problem. A Forbes study released the day after Christmas found that Texas ranks third worst for drunk driving.
We’re not certain exactly where Nacogdoches County ranks, but things appear to be getting worse.
We’ve counted at least 17 driving while intoxicated arrests in Nacogdoches County so far in December. That’s nearly two a day on average, which is up a steady increase from our calculations over the past three years.
Why don’t these drivers think you’ll get caught? Enforcement is always heightened during the holiday season, leading to campaigns like the Texas Department of Public Safety’s “Drive Sober. No Regrets.”
We preferred the old “Driver Sober or Get Pulled Over” and “Drive Sober or Go to Jail” slogans, because even the most sober driver can be injured or killed by someone drunk behind the wheel, leading to lots of regret and heartache.
We would like to think that by now, most people know better than driving while intoxicated, but apparently some don’t. There’s no excuse for driving while intoxicated, which it is the most preventable crime.
Plan to stay where you’re going. Have a designated driver. Call a cab or rideshare service. Heading into 2024, there are more ways than ever to avoid driving drunk.
Yet there’s something about New Year’s Eve that makes it drunk driving amateur night. People who would never think of hitting the highway or winding county road sauced.
We don’t understand it, but we know the fallout.
In 2022, 1,162 people — about the population of Garrison and Cushing combined — were killed in drunk driving crashes in Texas, a 2% increase from the year before, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.
An average of 80 people die in alcohol-related crashes on New Year’s Day, according to the AAA Foundation Study.
These are sobering statistics that we hope will keep our readers from drinking and driving on New Year’s Eve.
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Dallas Morning News. December 27, 2023.
Editorial: Rising insurance costs in Texas are the latest threat to housing affordability
We can’t avoid weather, but we can do more to mitigate its impact on our lives.
There’s no secret that Texas has a housing affordability crisis. Too few houses built after the pandemic, high land costs and mortgage rates and burgeoning population are among key factors.
Less evident is the increasing difficulty of homeowners to obtain affordable insurance. And that’s the reason for Texas policymakers to think proactively about the repercussions of extreme weather and outdated building and land-use policies on affordability and insurability.
Insurance is all about anticipating risks, and Texas’ staggering population growth and weather patterns have added new levels of risk. Decades ago, hail would land in an empty field. Now hail will hit a $500,000 house and $45,000 car, and an insurer will have financial exposure.
This year, Texas encountered 16 weather or climate disaster events with losses of more than $1 billion, the highest yearly count since 1980. As a result, Texas Department of Insurance statistics show that homeowner premiums rose 10.8% in 2022, the highest percentage increase since 12.9% in 2012
To reduce their financial exposure this year, some carriers no longer accept new homeowners insurance business in North Texas, are choosing not to renew existing policies or are linking homeowners insurance with bundled auto policies, according to a recent Dallas Morning News story. Other companies are increasing deductibles or changing coverage terms, potentially leaving unsuspecting homeowners on the wrong side of a claim.
Even with increased weather risks in the hurricane-prone Texas Gulf and other weather risks elsewhere in the state, Texas is a better risk market than California and Florida, where insurers are bailing out. Still, Texas ranks eighth in the U.S. for overall climate vulnerability, according to Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University research. And that’s during this year when hurricanes didn’t queue up on the Texas Coast as they often do.
This should be a wake-up call that more frequent severe weather patterns are in the state’s future and could make some regions uninsurable or prohibitively expensive. Unfortunately, Texas’ disaster planning focuses on preparedness and recovery when it also needs to develop comprehensive plans to adjust building and land-use practices to offset the economic impact of bad weather on homeowners and insurers.
Texas policymakers would be well-served to encourage greater public-private sector collaboration to make homes more resilient to climate and weather patterns, and improve drainage systems and other infrastructure to mitigate flooding and other insurance risks. The one thing that they should not do is to cap prices or otherwise subsidize risks, which would artificially understate actual insurance risks and possibly ignite an insolvency crisis in the event of a major catastrophe.
We can’t change the weather, but we can do more to mitigate its impact on our lives.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. December 27, 2023.
Editorial: Who was the most embarrassing Texan this year? See if you can beat our list
Texans are larger than life, and unfortunately, that includes when they screw up, too. 2023 was a banner year for missteps and overkill. This list of those who embarrassed our state is by no means comprehensive, but it’s a good reminder that sometimes, the world scowls at us for a reason.
Alex Jones
Didn’t know he was a Texan? Born in Dallas, the InfoWars alt-right conspiracy theorist hosts his show from Austin. He’s always been nutty, but peddling the bizarre conspiracy that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax turned him into a true villain. At the end of 2022, Jones was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in legal judgments against the families of the victims.
Amid his long-running personal bankruptcy case, in November, the families offered to settle for far less — at least $85 million over 10 years. To make matters worse, Elon Musk, the owner of X, let Jones come back to the platform and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Jones. What will it take for this guy to finally lose any public credibility?
Elon Musk
Speaking of Musk, we liked X when it was Twitter. It’s a great place for news as it broke, a little joshing around, and remaining connected to people who like the same topics. All that seemed to change when Musk moved SpaceX to Texas and then bought the online platform, changing not just its apropos name but a bunch of other things, too.
Now, the platform’s algorithm is goofy, there’s far less engagement, verified folks got dropped and could only get their coveted blue checks back if they paid for a nominal subscription. But worst of all, there was also Musk’s dalliance with antisemitic rhetoric, including the gross, racist “replacement theory.” When he’s revolutionizing industry, Musk is inspiring. Lately, though, he just makes us cringe.
Jimbo Fisher
The man hired to take Texas A&M football to the next level had it mired in mediocrity, so bad that boosters wanted him gone. That’s no crime, but his contract ran through 2031 at an average of $9 million per year, so Fisher’s getting a $78 million payout. Wild, even by Texas football standards.
As ESPN reporter Peter Burns posted, that means Fisher is raking in about $1,083 per hour for the foreseeable future. As we opined in an editorial, the whole debacle is a disgrace. We’re piling on Fisher here, but he’s the face of a sport out of control. A&M deserves a heap of scorn too.
Alex Bregman
The Astros star gloated when Houston won the American League West on the final day of the season over the Rangers, pompously saying, “People were wondering what it was gonna be like if the Astros didn’t win the division. I guess we’ll never know.”
But we sure know what it’s like when the Rangers beat the Astros in the playoffs and then go on to win the World Series, don’t we?
Tarrant Appraisal District officials
Texas property taxes are a thorn in the side of property owners, but Tarrant County officials somehow managed to make it worse this year. In a meeting to discuss the agency’s new website this fall, the head of the information systems department, Cal Wood, was heard assenting to “creating a false narrative that distances the truth from the media.” He argued that “the further you create the truth from what’s being reported, the better you are.”
It’s not like we fall asleep at night hoping our politicians or bureaucrats are better than us, but is it too much to ask that they have some integrity? Wood was quickly dispatched, but it was the capper of an era of questionable management at the district. Let’s hope 2024 is a clean slate for an agency that people need to be able to trust with a crucial mission: fair, accurate appraisals.
Dan Patrick and Dade Phelan
You might like one over the other, or neither, depending on your politics, but when it comes to dealing with each other over the state’s business, both the lieutenant governor and House speaker are chaotic, controversial and catty. Between the Ken Paxton impeachment trial and the many legislative sessions, they bickered over nearly everything. It delayed progress on property taxes, prevented pay raises for teachers and sank Gov. Greg Abbott’s school choice initiative. There’s a fine Texas tradition of House-Senate rivalry, even vitriol, but these two have taken it too far.
Ken Paxton
The attorney general could lead a list like this every year, but in 2023, he outdid even himself. He reached a settlement of more than $3.3 million with whistleblowers who accused him of abusing office, then later had his lawyers claim they were just bitter ex-employees. His desire for taxpayers to fund it eventually led to the House impeachment inquiry against him.
And his trial gave Texas its biggest black eye, revealing that politics trump his obvious unfitness for office. Republican senators let him off the hook, but Paxton was revealed as a paranoid tyrant willing to twist a vital part of Texas government to help a friend and donor. And when it was all over, Paxton went right back to playing politics with his office, suing the State Department on behalf of conservative media outlets and investigating a liberal group on behalf of Musk.
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Houston Chronicle. December 27, 2023.
Editorial: Texas kicks kids off Medicaid for paperwork problems. Other states have a fix.
Since April, states across the country have been kicking people off Medicaid, and no state has kicked off more people than Texas. We’re at 1.7 million. And counting.
Some of this is right-sizing. Medicaid is health insurance for low-income households, paid for by both federal and state governments. After several years of pandemic-era protections, people who have aged out or who now earn too much to qualify are no longer covered by the program, and it’s up to the states to sort all that out. Texas is a big state, so it seems logical that our numbers would be high.
But Texas isn’t just removing families for good reasons. More than 858,000 children lost coverage for missing signatures, late paperwork or other procedural reasons — issues that have nothing to do with whether they should qualify or not, kicking out kids whose families might have to decide between an inhaler and dinner, between medication and bills.
While filling out the application and gathering the documents that it requires, people hit all sorts of snags. Mail gets delayed or sent to an old address. Sometimes the forms are hard to find in the language the person speaks. Sometimes the state’s computer system kicks users off because they’re taking too long.
Yes, the state has made some effort to improve matters. It’s loosened some requirements, and Texas Health and Human Services dispatched loads of robocalls, emails text messages and such to help people learn about the process.
But why should the process be so hard in the first place? Especially when it could be much, much simpler.
Every state employs some version of a process called “data-driven” renewal, generally recognized as an accurate and efficient way to keep eligible people in the program minus all the hassle. Also known as auto-renewal or ex parte renewal, it uses reliable data sources, such as the Texas Workforce Commission and Social Security, to assess quickly whether an individual still qualifies. It entirely spares people from filling out a renewal application and gathering all those documents themselves. Plus, they dodge all the possible mishaps.
For the first time, thanks to federal reporting requirements, we now know how Texas stacks up compared to other states when it comes to data-driven renewal. And it’s bad. Dead last bad. So bad that this month Texas, along with a handful of other states, received a scolding letter from the federal government, urging it, in part, to do a better job.
Just 2.7% of people in Texas considered for renewal were approved via the data-driven process, according to an analysis by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group. That’s compared to a national average of roughly 31%.
“If we could just get up to the average, we’d have so many eligible kids who aren’t churning in and out of the program,” said Stacey Pogue, a senior policy analyst at Every Texan.
The unnecessary bureaucracy seems deliberate, given Texas’ general stinginess with Medicaid. The state has failed to expand Medicaid, beyond only recently extending it for new mothers, and has woefully poor coverage of children to begin with.
We don’t doubt that workers at the state’s health and human services commission are diligent and would rather see eligible people covered than not. What we question is why our leaders don’t set our agencies up to succeed. If Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas lawmakers value life as much as they claim, why isn’t the state at the top of the list for getting eligible children covered by Medicaid? They should spend the time before the next legislative session figuring it out.
“It boils down to, we make choices about how hard we want parents to work to keep their kids covered,” said Pogue. “And I think Texas often makes the choice to say it shouldn’t be easy.”
In what should be a win-win scenario, Texas is choosing to lose.
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AIM Media Texas. December 29, 2023.
Editorial: Let’s make resolution to make better choices in upcoming elections
Many people make New Year’s resolutions, even though few manage to keep them. Still, we keep trying, and many experts say any improvement is better than none, and the annual assessment of how we live, and can improve, our lives is a positive exercise.
For those looking for the best resolution to make this upcoming year, we’d like to make a suggestion. It’s something that is relatively easy to accomplish, although many people don’t bother to do it.
More voters should resolve to be more active during the many elections during 2024. More importantly, they should pledge to make better decisions at the ballot box.
Most likely, few people would deny that our current political machine — at virtually all levels — is a mess. Our president is fighting historic low approval ratings — and almost all of those seeking to replace him are even less respected.
Bickering among members of Congress has gotten so bad that physical altercations have been reported.
It’s not much better at the state and local level, where states are rounding up immigrants and sending them to other states, and enacting laws that regulate personal decisions ranging from medical care to what books people can and can’t read. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott seemed more focused on keeping people out of the state than on providing services for those who live here, and the legislature endured four special sessions, in addition to their regular session, to rehash Abbott’s wish to fund private schools with public money because he refused to take no for an answer.
In the Rio Grande Valley some school boards have spent more time and energy fighting political battles than focusing on education. Several of them lobbied state lawmakers to force the dissolution of the South Texas Independent School District, which has consistently been rated as one of the best in the nation.
Such actions, and the people who commit them, are roundly criticized, but we can’t escape the truth that we put those people in those positions. Every elected official, and every appointed official they empanel, is the result of a majority of voters who make bad or uninformed choices — and an even greater majority of people who don’t bother to vote, and thus enable the bad choices to dominate.
Greater participation can help reduce the chances that corrupt people and their confederates will win on Election Day.
Moreover, voters should remember that we elect people from our own ranks. They are no smarter than anyone else, and their election doesn’t magically bestow special knowledge or wisdom upon them.
Thus, we can’t presume that politicians know more about medical decisions than trained doctors do. They don’t know more about appropriate reading material than educated teachers and librarians do. They don’t know what’s best for children than their parents do.
Let us resolve, therefore, to take every opportunity to vote that we can. More importantly, let us resolve to inform ourselves better as we prepare to cast those votes.
If more people can make — and keep — such resolutions, we can help create elected bodies that are responsive to the people rather than to their own interests.
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