The Liberty Cafe: Recent Episodes
Bill Peacock
Liberty doesn't come naturally to us. The human heart naturally tends toward oppression; either to oppress or be oppressed. Yet, by God's grace He has provided a spark of liberty in His people. At the Liberty Cafe, we take a look at the dividing line between liberty and oppression, which is often missed in our fallen world.
Conservatives notched a ton of victories on election night with a handful of moderates holding on. We break it all down today.
While at the Texas GOP convention we had the opportunity to sit down with Dan Patrick about all things Texas.
Grassroots candidates are closing with positive messages while the moderates continue with numerous last minute attacks. The Texas GOP is also meeting this week to make some big decisions.
This week Democrats and liberal Republicans completely lost their mind when conservatives called out Dade Phelan for how he acquiesced to Democrats, who fled Texas in an attempt to try to kill election integrity policy.
Today, we sit down with Matt Rinaldi and discuss his 3-year tenure as Texas GOP Chair. We also discuss how the Party has been positively reformed, what we need to do in the future, and how we have become a model for other states.
Moderate candidates are struggling in their debates. Democrats are also running on their own abortions.
Texas Scorecard’s new documentary was just released. We talk about that and overview a bunch of the runoffs going on in Texas.
Some House conservatives are setting the tone for next session early. Also, what questions should you ask candidates for RPT Chair?
Today we have a discussion with Tom Oliverson on why he’s running for speaker and the structural changes he believes should occur to reform the Texas House.
A decade-long political witch hunt concluded this week and Ken Paxton won. Tom Oliverson announced his candidacy for the speaker, and Dade Phelan revealed his plan to indoctrinate all the incoming freshmen.
A liberal Senator is trying to neuter incoming Republican freshmen. Immigration policy is being thwarted by federal courts and a local establishment mayor is giving us a great window into the broken establishment mindset that leads them to backing the wrong candidates.
Dennis Bonnen, Jordan Berry, Dustin Burrows and their whole crew are in crisis mode to save their Democrat coalition in the Texas House.
Today we give you an overall idea of how the primary elections turned out. Texas is moving in the right direction.
First off, I wrote a new song. More on that at the end. Donald Trump has endorsed several more conservative candidates and the Austin swamp is has poured over […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv7ksEMMmrU Speaker Dade Phelan has been caught up in a scandal where records show he is overcharging Texas taxpayers to rent one of his buildings. Also, Donald Trump is […]
Abbott continues to attack incumbents who are now using immigration to defend their Democrat policy positions. Kuempel doesn’t think Democrat chairs are real and Shaheen would vote for Daffy […]
Dade Phelan is in a free fall and his liberal cohort is being attacked across the state. Greg Abbott came out strongly against Democrat chairs, Dan Patrick is communicating Dade’s […]
Donald Trump jumped into his first Texas House race this cycle following polling that shows Dade Phelan under water for re-election. Establishment R’s are working hard to take back […]
Seriously, one liberal Republican challenged Sid Miller to a duel. Lynn Stucky also botched his answer on Ken Paxton at a recent debate. A lot is going on across […]
Chorazin had a spectacular view of the Sea of Galilee, but an even better view of history of history in the making. They squandered both.
Today we start the show with a commemoration of Jill Glover’s life. We also answer the question about whether or not State Representatives in Texas voted to raise their own […]
Too often, conservatives cede the selection of the rhetorical battleground to the left. It is why we are losing.
Today we talk about all the movement going on across the state and break down all of the conservative challengers to liberal Republican incumbents.
Austin swamp member, Kelly Hancock, recently publicly criticized Ken Paxton for opposing fellow Austin swamp member, Stephanie Klick. Brian Harrison left the Freedom Caucus after a national media clip […]
People who cower and cringe rarely fight back. The political elite wants us to live lives full of anxiety so that we can be more easily controlled.
Let’s finish off the new year with some impactful year end donations to some great conservative causes.
Today we talk about a few state representatives who continue to fight against conservatives and for the Austin swamp. We also talk about polling that is showing Dade Phelan […]
Stop waiting for a politician to do your job. It is up to us to re-take our government and our culture.
We are now officially in campaign season. The Senate has now removed the last remaining Democrat chair from a committee and we are seeing GOP internal party victories across Texas. […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58qoM42AOqc Governor Greg Abbott is endorsing Mike Olcott. Dan Patrick explains a rule for how the Senate decides what to vote on. Dade Phelan has no list of public supporters. […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTZfQuock2I&t=1s We have numerous retirements and actions from Abbott and Patrick that are laying the groundwork for next year. We also spent time today reflecting on everything that Conservatives […]
Every generation must shrug the vestiges of socialism if we are truly thankful for liberty.
Last Friday, the Texas House of Representatives killed an effort to bring school choice to Texans. On this week’s Liberty Café, Bill talks about why killing the proposal was actually […]
The field is now set and we know that 21 Republicans are willing to vote with their Democrat partners to protect liberal teacher unions. Now Dade Phelan and his […]
Last week Texans voted to increase state spending by $13.8 billion. This week on the Liberty Cafe, Bill looks at how this will centralize power in Texas government at the […]
Did you know that many are calling the last session the most pro-Muslim session in Texas history? That’s because Dade Phelan empowered Democrats while the Texas Senate shut them down! […]
On Veterans Day, we should thank those who served… and make sure we are building a republic worth serving.
Dade Phelan has broken his deal with Greg Abbott and is getting called out by Dan Patrick. The special session is wrapping up with so much left to do. https://youtu.be/SZVeMusDGXo Transcribed by […]
Feeding an irksome “frenemy” to an alligator in the fray of an internecine fight might feel good, but it ignores that the alligator will next be looking to feed on you.
-The House kills school choice efforts yet again, despite the push by Gov. Greg Abbott -Lawmakers accuse House Speaker Dade Phelan of violating the constitution -600,000 known ‘Gotaways’ reported at […]
One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist or philosopher to understand that some very unhealthy things are going on in our world today. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill […]
https://youtu.be/DOdfdJ21zCw Jeff Leach got trounced by conservatives when they caught him in a lie. Ann Johnson admitted that they constantly give R’s “little wins” to try to keep primary voters […]
The world tells us that the ends justify the means if we make them sound righteous enough.
On November 7, Texans will vote whether to spend $13.8 billion of taxpayer money. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill examines how Texas corporations are doing all they can to […]
Jeff Leach continues to show himself as an entirely unserious lawmaker. Today we break down in detail just how silly he is. We also discuss why it shouldn’t surprise any Texas Republican […]
Self-pity is a bottomless pit when we make our lives about ourselves. INTRO: In this week’s reflection, Michael Quinn Sullivan writes that rather than star as the martyrs in our […]
https://youtu.be/wfJUEK-mQhs With Texas House District 2’s seat now vacant, a special election will be held to fill it on the November ballot. With just over a month to go, […]
Political purity czars are a lonely lot and rarely as pure as they perceive themselves.
Greg Abbott has significantly increased the list of conservative policies being addressed this special session. Today we overview all of those policies and what their passage would mean […]
America watched as church leaders in 2020 put the gathering of the saints on par with the meeting of the Rotary Club.
Texans have an opportunity to cut state spending by up to $13.8 billion on November 7. And Texas politicians can do nothing about it. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill explains how eight constitutional amendments on the ballot provide voters this opportunity.
The Republican Party of Texas has called on Dade Phelan to resign and Nate Schatzline is uniting with conservatives who are all coalescing to demand conservative policy wins for the […]
The Huffines Liberty Foundation is out with a new white paper that estimates Texas has spent well over $50b on educating illegals in the last 10 years. The Republican Party […]
Donald Trump had one of the most successful, conservative administrations in U.S. history. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill will discuss some signs that suggest a second Trump administration may not be as conservative.
The Texas Senate did the right thing. They acquitted Ken Paxton. Not only did they do that, but the entire trial revealed just how much of a sham this impeachment […]
All law is a matter of morality; the only question is if that law is in keeping with, or foreign to, the moral precepts of holy scripture.
Last week, Texas experienced its first electric grid emergency since Winter Storm Uri. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill explains why the emergency would have never occurred on a grid without renewable energy.
Back in may, Andrew Murr, Ann Johnson and the leadership in the Texas House promised that Ken Paxton was a felon. That he was a criminal. They promised that even […]
As a self-governing nation, each of us are supposed to be the leaders. Do we act like it?
How does the Bible apply to America today? That can be a controversial topic. On this week’s Liberty Café, Bill examines this question in the context of how we might apply the First Commandment to the United States.
Last week, the Public Utility Commission of Texas voted to raise Texas’ electricity tax by $500 million a year. On this week’s Liberty Café, we’ll learn how the PUC and Texas Legislature are doing their best to keep this–and billions more in electricity taxes–hidden from public view.
The Texas Constitution opens with these words: “Humbly invoking the blessings of Almighty God, the people of the State of Texas, do ordain and establish this Constitution.” As we celebrate our nation’s independence, on this week’s Liberty Cafe Bill discusses how Texas and Texans might build on this foundation to better experience the blessings of God.
Texas conservatives disagree on which plan is the best way to provide property tax relief this year. On this week’s Liberty Café, Luke Macias joins Bill to discuss the different sides of this debate and what the path forward to property tax relief might look like.
Despite the injustice of the many attacks on President Donald Trump over the last 8 years, the recent federal indictment places him in significant legal jeopardy. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill discusses with former federal prosecutor George Parry the legal trouble Trump faces and possible scenarios under which the presidential candidate might avoid being convicted.
The Texas Legislature’s recently adopted budget contains the biggest spending increase in Texas history. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill also explains why the budget advances socialism and will reduce prosperity in Texas.
On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill begins his review of the Texas Legislature. Sadly, the Texas Legislature paid out more taxpayer money in gifts to big corporations that it gave back to Texans through property tax relief.
Christians should be ready to evaluate the workings of government, whether it be the just ended Texas Legislature’s regular session or those of governments in DC or other state capitals. Today, Bill continues with the third of a four-part series looking at what the Bible tells us about civil government.
Christians should be ready to evaluate the workings of government, whether it be the soon-to-end Texas Legislature’s regular session or those of governments in DC or other state capitals. Today, Bill continues with the second of a four-part series looking at what the Bible tells us about civil government.
Christians should be ready to evaluate the workings of government, whether it be the soon-to-end Texas Legislature’s regular session or those of government in DC or other state capitals. This week, Bill begins a four-part series looking at what the Bible tells us about civil government.
Even though the Texas Legislature isn’t quite finished, on this week’s Liberty Cafe Bill looks at where things are heading for Texas based on what the Legislature is doing–or not doing–right now.
There are many good Christian men and women in Texas government. However, on this week’s Liberty Cafe, Bill discusses how the Texas Legislature is moving us away from God’s design for this world.
The Texas grid is about as unreliable as they come. On this week’s Liberty Café, Texas state Sen. Bob Hall joins Bill to talk about his efforts to tackle this problem by taking on renewable energy subsidies and securing the Texas grid from attack.
Last week we noted that despite the fact that many Christians believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that is not the case. On this week’s Liberty Café, Pastor Rich Lusk joins Bill for Part 2 of our discussion of the church’s path to victory over the rulers of this world and the gates of hell.
Many Christians believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket; but that is not the case. On this week’s Liberty Café, Pastor Rich Lusk joins Bill for Part 1 of our discussion of the church’s path to victory over the rulers of this world and the gates of hell.
In 2021, a bipartisan coalition ended school property tax abatements for corporations and renewable energy companies. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, Vance Ginn and Tim Hardin join Bill to discuss how Big Government Texas Republicans are attempting to restore this program for their friends in Big Business. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text, as robots still have a lot to learn.Bill PeacockCorporate cronyism is in the news again, just recently, a member of the Texas Legislature filed a bill to reconstitute chapter 313 of the Texas tax code. If you don't know what that is, it's basically giving property tax abatements to big corporations, particularly multibillion dollar international corporations that run renewable energy projects here in Texas. So that program went away at the end of last year. And but now the Texas Legislature particularly it seems those in the Texas House are trying to bring that program back again, to cut property taxes for these big corporations, while the Texas legislature is in one sense, throwing pennies at real property tax reduction in the Texas Legislature and for us Texans. So that's what we're going to talk about today, on the Liberty cafe. Hi, this is Bill Peacock, and welcome to the Liberty cafe. It's always a blessing to have you here. And it's always a blessing to be sponsored by the good folks over Texas scorecard. They are doing great work in the fight for liberty here in Texas, and really all across the globe. So grow globe. So go please to Texas scorecard.com. And see what you can do to join in the fight for liberty there. Well, I have two special guests with me today on the Liberty cafe and looking forward to discussing. Chapter 313 and property tax abatements and corporate cronyism. And even more importantly, how we can have economic growth in Texas without all these government programs and government interventions. So just like everybody, I'd like to welcome Vance again. And Tim Hart Hart, and welcome, guys. Good to be here. Good to see you. So what Vance Ghen is a PhD economist. He has many years of experience working in that in in and around Texas government and the federal government as well. He spent a number of years as the chief economist and the center director for the Center for Economic prosperity at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and also spent some time up in Washington DC, as an economist with the Office of Management and Budget, under in the Trump White House. And he was smart, then got out of Washington, DC, although I'm sure working for the Trump White House was a great blessing, but came back down to Texas and is now a consultant here working on various projects here. Tim is a is the president and CEO of Texans for fiscal responsibility. outside of Austin here. He's also a pastor. And he was chief of staff in the Texas House of Representatives for about eight years. So both of them have a lot of experience in government and particularly on financial and fiscal matters. And and both I would say also are married with beautiful wives and beautiful children. So again, it's good to have you here, guys. So let's go ahead and get started and talk about this. So So Vance, you, you've been worked with both. You've been working on this for a long time. But Vance, you particularly have been focusing and thought a lot about chapter 313. Can you just give us a rundown on what that program looks like and what it's been doing over time? Yeah, Bill, and it really is a pleasure to be here with you today. And thank you for all your great work over the years as well. Chapter 313 has been in place for a while now. And it's basically a property tax abatement for big businesses so that they will not have to pay as much in property taxes as they otherwise would. Very little very minimal compared to what they otherwise would. Part of that agreement with school districts. This is Chapter 313. So it's dealing with school districts that given this abatement for a specified period of time, they're supposed to create a number of jobs, you have these new investments, bring in so much money to the community, and hopefully be economic development is what some consider it to be to the community at large and a large part of that. But you know, what's also a part of this chapter 313, is that the school, you know, they don't lose any additional money, the money is still funded by the state to match any sort of the amounts of the abatement. So they're not really out of anything here. The ones that ultimately end up lose are the other taxpayers in the process who they shift this burden because the spending doesn't go down. So they still got to fund the overall spending. And that burden of that spending is shifted in the form of higher taxes on other taxpayers in the process. And we've seen Bill over the years and you've done a lot of good research on this as well. You know, I think it's in the billions 10s of Bill. US dollars, I forget the exact amount that you put on in the past, but it's a massive amount of money that's been debated that's that's just been shifted to other people because again spending to not go down. That's the ultimate burden of government. And and what we've seen in the process is that many of these intended amounts of job, number of jobs are going to be created will never came into existence. They certainly weren't permanent jobs, they were very temporary jobs and things of that nature. The schools continue to get additional funding, we've seen how outcomes haven't matched funding levels the same time. So we've seen that going on. At the end of the day, this is picking winners and losers, it should not be a role for government to be standing in the way of what the market forces are of pride, the pricing system, and everything else in the knowledge that's created. Now, you talk a lot about this as well in the program of sound economics, where the knowledge that's gained from the price system is so important, and you're distorting all of that with the sort of, you know, picking winners and losers with the chapter 313 That ultimately goes ultimately to build to to large businesses, and oftentimes unreliable sources of energy, those projects for renewable energy projects. And when you're doing that, I think at the end of the day, you're just wasting taxpayer money. Yeah, I think wasting taxpayer money is a good way to summarize chapter 313. Right, it just doesn't do as much good. So Tim, you were part of the process and the Texas legislature last session, when, in 2021, when the chapter 313 program went away, right, it was it's been a program in Texas for several decades. And but at the end of last session, it just it had to come up for renewal, as it often does. And I think the last time it was up in about 2015, if I'm not mistaken. And but this time, it wasn't renewed, what happened? Why did why did it go away? Well, I think you know, starting off, if you look at, you know, the support from from both parties, really both the Democrat Party and the Republican Party in their platforms oppose corporate welfare. And so this is the main reason the the parties and the people of Texas do not like corporate welfare. And if you look at three Thirteen's in the life of the program, I believe we spent about $11 billion dollars in its total. And so when people are suffering under inflation, when we are being priced out of our homes, because our property taxes continue to go up, when you bring that to people and say, hey, you know, we want to continue to spend this multibillion dollar corporate welfare program, it just doesn't go over very well. And so the, despite the efforts of lobbyists, and despite the efforts of even leadership, they just couldn't get it across the finish line was last go round. And I think that is a really good thing. And we'd like to see it, stay six feet under the ground for sure. Yeah, it was really interesting to watch this whole process last session, because there was this weird combination or coalition of the left and the right. On this right, there was the Texas Public Policy Foundation and TFR. But there's also the Houston Chronicle and the what used to be the Center for Public Policy Priorities, whatever that's called today, every, every every Texan, and and some of the some of the what you might call left wing or mainline religious groups and stuff out there, and who normally, you know, none of these groups on the left ever support. You know, they support big government. Right, they like that. But you know, Tim, what do you think there's the connection there between this this left and right, coalition? What brings them together? Well, I think it probably is, is different, right? For for each individual group, whether you're talking about Democrats or Republicans, I think Democrats tend to want to see welfare, but not corporate welfare, because they see big corporations taking tax dollars is taking away from individual welfare, you know, things like snap and things they're promoting. And so ultimately, they they're still trying to grow government. They're just trying to, you know, increase welfare to the individual, not corporations. I think, you know, most Republicans are people who declare themselves to be conservatives believe in principles of limited government, and that we should cut government and that we should not be picking winners and losers. And so I think on the right side, I think that it is it is an ideological a listen, we should not be handing out tax dollars and letting the government pick winners and losers. We should be reducing the size of government and reducing government's influence on the free markets. And that is the best way to have success both for individuals and for corporations. It's pretty amazing what happened. So the program expired this past December 31. And what that means is so all the all the applications that were approved, and gotten made it through the process. Just before that time, they're still in effect that it's not like, the damage is going away, but at least no more damage is coming in. But you can see how popular this is with big business. You know, from the I looked at the some of the numbers from the period of time from June 1 2021, which is when it became obvious that the program was going to die in a year and a half through the end of last year. So almost a year and a half. Or just over a year and a half. There were 461 applications filed by big businesses, you know, they were just zooming in. It's funny, the comptroller said it was a new record, right? For new applications. Well, of course it is, they're all lining up the trough trying to get their applications before it expires. The good news is, is that only 362 of those were approved during that time. So that's kind of the good news, bad news kind of thing. You know, at least they weren't all approved, you, you would have hoped that maybe the comptroller would have been a little more inefficient during that period. But But that's kind of what we wound up with and the number of the tax limitations. So the reduction in values, we're about $12 billion from all these, which means that that kind of works out to a tax savings, tax cuts for all these corporations for about $270 million. So that's $270 million, that the rest of us are going to have to be paying into public schools and other things. But But these businesses aren't, it's really a mess. Yeah, it is Bill. And, you know, one of the things one of the first lessons that economics is that incentives matter. And so whenever something's going away, this is incentivizing bit these businesses to come out and you know, that they want, they want their tax breaks, you know, they want to be as profitable as possible. So why wouldn't they want to lower their costs, the incentives are in place for them to do that. And I think what you said earlier, Tim, kind of the breakdown between the political divide was, was spot on. And this is where it all comes in. That's to say, look, this is just a bad deal for both sides, who would ends up helping the most are politicians in those businesses that get the tax breaks, right? But But politicians want to do this because they win votes. This is public choice economics, where you get rent seekers that come in, and they want to have those votes and say, look, look at all what we did in this area. But the ones that lose every single time are the taxpayers. And this is another example. And I was glad to see chapter 3313 in in December, I'm hopeful that something will will will not pass this time. But there's going to be a lot of pressure once again, because of that rent sinky because of the big businesses because of the associations and everyone else to put something else in its place. And that's exactly the case. Well, we'll, we'll see what comes up. Matter of fact, why don't we just talk a little bit about that now, Tim? So so the one reason we're having this conversation is that a bill was filed to renew this. Can you kind of tell us where things stand what's going on right now, with this new legislation and what the landscape looks like? Yeah, sure. I believe this was filed by Lizano. And in my, my understanding the bill is it's the only one so far I've seen and it seems to be putting it right back into place in the exact same form. It was. So it's truly just bringing it back. There's been, of course discussion about, you know, renewable energy. There's a considerable amount of these three Thirteen's that were given, you know, solar and wind farms in the past. And that's been a sticking point for some, you know, Republicans, and so there's been calls to remove that from we might see, you know, if this gets to the floor, we might see an amendment that would remove those to make it more palatable, to pass for Republicans. You know, there's been whispers and rumors that if they take it out, we might see them throw it right back in and a conference committee or something like that. I would imagine that's a real possibility. I'm sure all those lobbyists for those green energy companies want those tax abatements as well. We have also heard feeling the Speaker of the House came out publicly before session started and said I want this to be renewed. He is unashamedly said, we want to bring this back. I don't know if there's a strong sentiment in the Senate. I don't think there is. But we're going to find out in the next few months exactly how much want there is to pass in the Senate. And so my understanding right now is that this bill would essentially bring 33 Thirteen's back in the same form they were in and they're just going to take another shot and see if they can whip the votes to flip this thing around and bring it back in its its same form as of right now. So Vance, earlier you were talking about before we got on on line here you were talking about an article you saw the talks about Fort Worth is signed on to an effort to to push this this program through the Texas Legislature and I think there were like 180 or something like that businesses and others in this coalition's I mean, who's behind all this and. Why is it so important to? Yeah, Bill? I mean, that's one of the important things. Here's the look back behind the cut behind the scenes right behind the curtain, what's actually going on. And this was out of the Fort Worth report, February 18 2023, that talks about, you know, this loss of multibillion dollar job deals to other states, nearly 180 top manufacturers, business leaders and economic development chiefs across the state are waging a unified appeal to the Texas Legislature to adopt new state incentives to, quote, bring jobs and long term revenue to Texas communities in quote. And so there's a number of them that are involved with this. I mean, you've got the Texas Association of Business Association and manufacturers, Texas chemical Council, Texas Economic Development Council, Texas, the taxpayers and Research Association, among a number of others across this state, you know, greater Arlington Chamber of Commerce and Fort Worth, as well, Grand Prairie. Anyway, you go through a whole bunch of the list that's in this article. But it really just shows that there is a lot of demand, not demand by individuals, not by individual Texans, but demand by politicians and demand by big associations that are backed and supported by mostly big businesses. Also, renewables, even some oil and gas folks are in this as well. Right? This is this is kind of across the board. This isn't just picking on a reliable, unreliable sources of energy, although I think they need a lot of picking on this is also oil and gas too. And so what we really need ultimately, you know, Bill and someone you've done a great job working on over the years. And Tim, as well, as you're finding this this Texas model, I think we want to talk some about on what brings everyone here. Why are we still having 1000 people moving to Texas every day and business is moving here. And I would argue that it's not because of these incentives, these economic development deals, can chosen by politicians of what they think is right, because many of these are not profitable. There's not the high return on investment that they are that they claim, and it's not needed. In Texas, what is needed is more free markets, more economic freedom, more opportunities for people to live their lives for businesses to flourish, instead of going on to all these other guys. And you know, these big businesses really want big associations and politicians. Let's think about Texans and taxpayers. Yeah, exactly the case. Tim, you're so you're the president, CEO of Texas for fiscal responsibility. But I would assume that there's more behind it, you want more than just people being or the state being fiscally responsible, there's a purpose behind that right there that, that you that there's a reason that we want the government to be fiscally responsible? Because there there are good things that happen when that happens. And if you will, you know, I was looking at this article from the Houston business journal that's complete where people down in Houston area are complaining that the Texas miracle is over. Right, because and here's what the subhead says it says, big businesses are already steering clear the state now that a key incentive is gone. So when you're looking at things from the Texas miracle perspective, economic growth perspective, do you really think it's, you know, government incentives to big businesses that makes Texas flourish economically, or if not, what is it? So I would say, No, and I, you know, we actually have a couple of statements that would would back that up. We have a study that was put out in 2018. And this is the effects of state and local incentives, it estimated that at least 75% of those businesses that received incentives would have still opted to relocate without those. And more specifically, in 2017, there was a study done in Texas of at chapter 313, abatement recipients and found only 15% of those businesses that received the incentives would have located elsewhere without them. And so of, you know, chapter 313 recipients, only a small fraction of those, it even played a role in them wanting to relocate to Texas anyways. And so it's a very small percentage. And my guess is that could be even be exaggerated as well. I would argue that people want to move to Texas for a number of different reasons. You know, the I think the best incentive package is limiting state and local spending, eliminating things like property taxes, you know, giving abatements for everybody, not just for businesses that will still attract businesses here and shrinking the size of government and encroachment of government. I think there's also a cultural standpoint, I think people have moved here. Because of the culture of Texas because of the economy of Texas. You look at, for instance, Elon Musk, relocating Tesla, I think a lot of that was our less regulatory environment compared to California. But I also think that you know, Looking at how he has kind of reacted to the woke culture and everything else, I think he's just he's moved to Texas for the culture just as much as he has for the economy. So there's a lot of variables there. But ultimately, it comes down to a freer market is always a better market, where we have more competition. We have businesses that want to come in where the state is not picking winners and losers. So the less tentacles of government we can have on both individuals and businesses. That is the best incentive. And if we're going to talk about property tax abatements, like I said, that what we should be doing is talking about eliminating property taxes altogether. Could you imagine if we eliminated property taxes for, you know, homesteaders and real estate investors and businesses, I think that would be a phenomenal incentive. And we wouldn't have to pick winners and losers. We wouldn't have to steal from Texas taxpayers to give to multibillion dollar international woke corporations who by the way, are many of these are silencing conservatives, Facebook receives incentives, Tesla receives incentives. There's a lot of other kind of Silicon Valley that have absolutely been caught canceling conservatives in the last couple of years, but yet the state is continuing to give them money. It seems counter counterintuitive to me. Yeah, and I want to hit on property taxes, just just a second here, and see what the state of play is for that. But you mentioned the cultural attraction of Texas, it reminds me of that the Babylon B videos, have y'all seen those, but the couple from California, and the guy really just takes to this new gun and meat culture, because you know, he wasn't getting that stuff out in California, the wife takes a little bit longer, but eventually she gets in there too, right? And I think you're right. I mean, that's what brought Davy Crockett, here, if you read his letters, you know, from from years ago, freedom, and liberty and opportunity, right? Those are the kinds of things that bring people here. And, you know, we've talked about with with folks, y'all and others about how, you know, when and I think maybe, Tim, you were just mentioning this, that, you know, people come to Texas, and they they they may not be conservative, in a political sense Republican necessarily, but they valued his freedom and opportunity. And it draws them here. And then they they turn around and start voting for that where they want more freedom and liberty. Whereas when we have these, these property tax abatements, and I think this what you were talking about earlier, Tim is, you know, big businesses come here, and they bring all their liberal employees with them. And it shifts it shifts the culture the other way here in Texas. Yeah. And Bill, if I could just add real quick G with it with the Texas model. You know, we also don't have a personal income tax, which I think is huge, you know, relatively less government spending, we need to do a better job. We've all been talking about that. relatively less, you know, taxes, more sensible regulatory climate that you've had, that we've had here. And I think that that's really shown in a lot of ways of why people are moving to Texas, you know, 1000 people moving here every day, when I was in DC, in the Trump administration, you know, the deregulation, and the tax cuts and Jobs Act, the combination of those things, we saw a lot more growth, we saw businesses moving back to the United States now should have done a better job on spending and a lot of other things. Okay, but those were two big areas that helped to support more growth. And if you just think about the salt deduction of $10,000, of what the dynamics of that has been of moving people from California, to Texas, and Florida, and Tennessee, the places without an income tax. Now we add into this situation. And I think this is where the folks who want these incentive deals are saying, Look, I can't compete with Florida and Tennessee, if we don't have these deals. And I just think that that is that is not sound, that that's not the way that we want to go is to go against economic freedom. The Fraser Institute puts out the economic free of North America index they do based on spending taxes and regulations, labor market regulations, Texas ranks the fourth highest, the fourth most free. Florida ranks number one right now New Hampshire is up there. Tennessee is up there. So we have our own competition. Yes, correct. But we want it towards more economic freedom, less government spending, lower taxes, more sensible regulation. Those are the types of things that we're going to bring about more opportunity, more human flourishing here in the great state of Texas, not by going down this progressive route of handing out money to others. Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned that it used to be that we here in Texas could could basically compare ourselves to any state and show how much better we were than those others. Now, I don't think we can do that, at least with Florida out there in Florida has lower property taxes in Texas. It also doesn't have an income tax. It's got low regulations. I mean, clearly, I mean, I don't know what the economic growth is looking like in Florida versus taxes but but my guess is you know, Florida is kind of taking the lead now in the when it comes to the Freedom Index when it when it comes to that. So I'm hoping that we can do some things, particularly on taxes to, to switch those roles back again. And speaking of that, let's let's move on to the property taxes. And we'll wrap up here pretty soon on on this topic so well, so we're getting property tax cuts for big business out of 313. We see this kind of bifurcation of the of the property tax system we've already seen over the years, increases in homeowners exemption. For instance, for homeowners, they get some exemptions that lower their property taxes, but renters don't get anything. And then, and then businesses don't get anything from that. But then we also see these big property tax cuts, we've been talking about 313. For business, we've been talking about 313. But there's also chapter 312, which are tax abatements from cities and counties. And so the system kind of gets broken up here. And, and everybody's fighting against each other rather than fighting against the government looking for big property taxes overall. So that's kind of the backdrop for the battle over property taxes going on. In Austin today, Tim, we've got this $32 billion surplus out there. I mean, maybe I'm naive, but I'm assuming just the legislature is going to give that all back to us in the form of property taxes. Based on some of Abbott's tweets and statements, you would think that right, because he often leads with, you know, the the surplus is taxpayer dollars, and we're gonna give it back to you in property tax. And so, so that means all of it, right? Well, no, that's that's actually not the case, at least currently, what we're seeing right now is in the general Appropriations Act, the budget both in the House and the Senate, they're pretty identical. What they're proposing, they're saying $15 billion in relief, that number is a little deceptive, they're actually using 5.3 of old compression from 2019, HB three in that number. So new relief, they're actually offering nine point 7,000,000,003 of that is a homestead exemption increase. And we're not a big fan of homestead exemption increases, mainly because it's a reaction to inflation, in my opinion. And if you if you remember, we just raised it from 25k to 40k. And now, I believe Patrick was kind of leading the way of increasing it from 40k to 70k. So it's about a $30,000 increase for that 3 billion. The problem is, you know, most homesteads, you know, they're capped at 10% growth. And so the average home in Texas being 300, or $350,000, you take 10% of that, that's 30 billion will we're going to eclipse that very quickly. If not immediately, we prefer to see that money put into compression, specifically school immuno compression, because this is permanent and long lasting. Of course, there's been a lot of rhetoric of the biggest property tax cut in history, we've heard really, all of the big three, say that as well as lawmakers, they're going off of a number, believe from it went into effect 2008, this is 14 point 2 billion. That was that was given in relief back then. So there, that's why they're kind of champing that $15 billion number, if you actually adjust that number for inflation, we're just under 20 billion. And so if we want to be, you know, intellectually honest, and say we're giving the biggest property tax cut in history, we should be closer to 20 billion, and we should be using that baseline of 9.7. So if we increased a 10,000,000,001, we would have to break the constitutional spending limit, which can be done with a simple majority. But I would go a step further and what our organization has pushed us we want to tie the hands of government and put ourselves on a path of property tax elimination. We're a fan of all of a sudden brought the first kind of version of this bill in the in the last couple of specials. Now we've seen Cain and Schaefer filed some very similar legislation using 90% of that surplus, which would equal of what about 28 or $29 billion to pay down immuno, and then it would specifically continue to compress those rates, biennium after biennium until that rate was zero. Think that is the best first step towards eliminating all property taxes because of course, we won't want to stop there. And there's there's other local limits. Maybe I'll let advanced kind of handle we want to do on the local level. But that's kind of where I see us right now. I think we have about three or 4 billion and wiggle room without breaking that constitutional spending limit. Of course, we're okay breaking that limit if you're going to give it to taxpayers. And so that's the current state of where we're at at the beginning of session. Vance Tim just talked about the the limits that property tax growth and things like that but in some research that that my organization how fines are one of my organization's how fines Liberty Institute, is your foundation is gonna be putting out pretty soon and I think TFR might be doing some work on this too. Is that you know, property tax the levy last year from 2021 to 2022, which is the year the most recent property tax relief went into effect. Property taxes went up 12% The levy went up 12% How is that possible kind of boggles my brain so I'm gonna let you explain it to everybody. How when we see all these limits 3.5% limits on growth of the property taxes in cities and counties and stuff like that. How do you get from 3.5% to 12%? Yeah, Billy definitely boggles the brain, and it has my my mind seeing price tag of how much Warman in property taxes, you're gonna have to pay. And I think Texans are seeing that all across this great state. And you don't even have to look at organizations as where the numbers are coming from the recent discussion in the House Appropriations, if you look at the LP bes summary pages, their presentation, just for school district property taxes, they showed the massive increase in school property taxes year over year 13%, right to 13%. So to your point, Bill, the school portion of House Bill 320 19, limited some of that growth to 2.5%. That's an existing property. And there's some other things in there, but 2.5%, that's well above that 13%, as well above the 2.5%. And then cities and counties, most of them, some were carved out because they had too small the population. There's some work some bills that have been filed now to try to remove that. And also didn't include debt, which some bills are trying to include debt now in there, too, which I think is a good idea. But that is limited to 3.5%. Well, they're growing 789 10 11%. And the reason why is because those limitations were only on property, like existing property, it didn't include any of the new property. And we've been growing by leaps and bounds. I've already said this a couple of times, we're growing 1000 people a day, a lot of them are getting new property, new homes, new businesses that are moving out. And none of that has been captured by these limitations. And then the ins, which is the interest in sinking portion, which is the debt portion hasn't been included underneath these limitations. And so all that growth is well above any of the growth that they've had underneath that those limitations, those rollback rates is what they're called. And those have got to come down. I mean, those limitations were better in the sense of the 8% rate, rollback rates we had before no doubt about it, right? Those were those were better. But given the growth that we've had now, and how we've really got to get control of spending and property tax growth, we need to know new revenue rate, the no new revenue rate just means that values are going up, that rates got to come down such that there's no new revenue to these local entities. And if they want new revenue, then you go to the voters, and you ask and you say, hey, look, this is the reason why we need those dollars. And then that should be a part of this process, instead of just going up by how much ever they want right now, because these limitations aren't doing a good job. Well, thank you, gentlemen, I think we've laid out a pretty good practical case of why we should not well, why should we should cut property taxes for everybody, and not just cut property taxes for a few big businesses, right? It just simply, it works better. Economically, the state is more vibrant, and jobs are more jobs. You know, government doesn't create jobs, people create jobs, businesses create jobs, and it just works better when property taxes are lower for all rather than just for a few special interest. But I think we should probably end here by talking about the moral component of all this. I mean, you know, if if, you know, no, I'm not saying that he would, but if, you know, Elon Musk came to Texas, for instance, and wanted to build, build the thing here, but he didn't want to pay all this was taxes. And he and he came, came over to my house and stuck a gun to my head and said, Hey, Bill, give me some of your money so I can pay my property taxes, he got to jail for something like that. But if he comes to Texas and goes to the Texas Legislature and to his local school district and local county and says, Hey, give me some bills money, then it's perfectly legal, and it's okay. And there's something wrong about that. I call it theft. And I think it's theft. Whether you do it with a gun and you do it with the government, it just the government has no business taking our money from us taxpayers and giving it to these big businesses. I just think that's, that's wrong. Yeah, I think, you know, we stand on the moral argument for property taxes in general, you know, the where we start is not necessarily policy but in the fact that if if you are paying perpetual property taxes, which there's a lot of problems with it, it's an unrealized gain, you know, when when our houses appreciate, but more importantly, you actually don't own your home. And if you think you own your home, I would encourage you to stop paying your property taxes, and you're probably going to find out really good. Luckily, who actually owns your home. And despite if we've paid our home off, you're going to pay those property taxes every single year, when you die, your kids will inherit that property, they will pay it forever, when they die, their kids will pay it forever. And so this is a it's really laughing in the face of the idea of private property, which is one of the principles that our country was founded upon. There are better ways to fund government than by perpetually taxing people out of their homes sometimes, you know, I would start with, we don't even need to have the conversation about a consumption based tax. How about we start with limiting the size of government and cutting the size of government? I think we could accomplish quite a bit just by doing that. But I think you know, at the heart of the property tax issue is an ethical and a moral argument, because we simply don't own our homes if we are renting from the government. Yeah, that's a really good way to wrap things up. If if we cut government spending in half, we can cut taxes in half to it's a really simple proposition for those people who aren't happy with taxes. Really spending is what leads and we have to reduce spending if we're going to ultimately reduce taxes on that. So Well, thank you both very much for being here. Today is a pleasure to have this conversation with you. Y'all are doing great work for Texans out there. And please keep it up. Thanks a lot, Bill. And thanks all you for listening to the Liberty Cafe today and joining us with our guests. And thanks again also to Texas scorecard, the sponsor of the Liberty cafe. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about the show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next timeTranscribed by https://otter.ai
Texas politicians have $64 billion of new revenue to distribute to favored constituencies this legislative session. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we discuss how little of that is targeted for taxpayers in the form of property tax cuts. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text, as robots still have a lot to learn:Bill PeacockWell, you may have heard that the Texas Legislature is sitting on about a $32 billion budget surplus. But what that doesn't really tell you is that's just for this past two years. If you look at the new money that the extra money that they have to spend over the next two years versus what they had, over the last two years, they're actually sitting on about $64 billion of new revenue. So you might be wondering, well, how much of that $64 billion of new revenue? Are they gonna give back to me? Do they need to spin it all? Shouldn't I get some of that back? Why do they need all that new revenue? Well, those are really good questions to ask. And that's what we're going to talk about, on this week's episode 116 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, this is Bill Peacock, and I'm really glad matter of fact, I'm blessed that you are with me here today on the Liberty cafe, thinking about what we can do to fight for liberty here in Texas. And I'm also glad to be a part of the Texas scorecard network. They're the sponsors of the Liberty cafe. And together, I think we're making some really good progress and, and building a world that's focused on liberty, the kind of liberty that God would have us live under first Christian liberty to do what is right, according to him, but also liberty to walk in obedience to Him in the world around us. Well, as I already mentioned, the Texas Legislature is sitting on $64 billion dollars, give or take a few billion dollars in new revenue. The way to think about that is if the legislature spent as much money over the next two years, they have a biennial to your budget. So if the legislature spent as much money over the next two years, as they did the last two years, they'd have 64 billion extra dollars to deal with. That's they could do whatever they wanted to with it. Well, unfortunately, when the legislature gets its hands on extra money, or new money like that, usually We're the last ones that they think about, and that's really unfortunate. But it's really actually the way it usually is. So you may have heard a lot of talk about how they're going to spend that when it comes to property tax cuts and other things. Well, the number that has been floated around out there? Well, it depends on who you're listening to. Governor Abbott, to his credit, came out and said that he wanted the largest property tax cut ever and wanted it or and or wanted to spend about half the budget surplus for property tax relief, depending on how you do that. But if you go back, the biggest tax cut was back in 2006, it was about $15 billion. If you index that for inflation, you're looking at about $20 billion. Or if you just do half the budget surplus, it's about $16 billion. But but that's not what they're talking about. Now the legislature has come out with a plan or people in it have come out with a plan that we're talking about $15 billion for property tax relief. That sounds pretty good. Until you realize that little more than $5 billion are that is just paying for the property tax relief they promised us last go around in 2021. It's nothing new. They're just pretending like it's new property tax relief, because $15 billion sounds a lot better than $9.7 billion, particularly when you compare it to 32 billion, or $64 billion. So they're trying to inflate the amount. It's budget gimmicks, like they do all the time in the legislature. So when you really look at the numbers that they're talking about. It looks like right now $9.7 billion for property tax relief is what we're looking at it just to put that in perspective, the there's also been talk about increasing teacher salaries, maybe as much as $6 billion. And then there's all this kind of spinning, focused on infrastructure and a lot of other things. So but the bottom line at this point is we're looking at about a $9.7 billion effort for property tax relief, out of $64 billion worth of new money. So you can do the math, but that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $53 billion in new spending $9.7 billion coming back to us. We're just not at the top of the list. So let me let me kind of look at these numbers for you. and give you some idea what that would actually look like from the perspective of property tax relief. So in this this past year 2022, we, if you have a home, or you have a business, you just wrote your property taxes, check for them, or maybe it comes out of your mortgage, but the property tax, property taxes for 2022, we're just due in January, the total property tax levy, for the entire state, this is for special districts, counties, cities and school districts was at $1.9 billion. That's a lot of property tax money that we send to local governments, and then also to the state because they take a lot of it and spin it on school districts. That was a big jump from the previous year back in 2021. But $8.9 billion. In fact, it went up about 12%. school property taxes actually went up about 13% during that period of time. This is despite the property tax relief effort that the legislature promised us and to 2021, where they expanded the homestead exemption and the 2019 effort where they did the compression, which is reducing school property tax rates, and putting limits on how much property taxes could grow. But, you know, for counties and cities, they put this 3.5% limit on it. But it turns out, those aren't really the limits. So instead of 3.5% growth and property taxes each year, we saw 13% 12% This last year, it I could go into all the details, but I want just keep in mind that what they tell you is rarely the truth when it comes to how much money they're spending. So we've got this $81 billion $82 billion, basically in property tax revenue. If the legislature goes forward with their plan, and does this $9.7 billion next year, this coming January, the property tax levy will be will go up to $84.3 billion. That's based on historic growth rates minus the the property tax relief, there'll be given us in year one, you got to remember that this 9.7 is a two year release. So they have to put some of it in the first year 2023. And then some of it in 2024. And so even though they put this money towards it, and it would actually be about $3.2 billion reduction in school property taxes. Based on historical growth, overall property taxes would go up, again to $84.3 billion, which is about a 2.6 $2.4 billion increase. So your property taxes won't go down, they'll go up and go up by quite a bit. Then if we go into 2024, we'll see basically the same thing. school, school property taxes will again stay about leveled, they'll drop just a little bit, so about $400 million or so. But overall property taxes, they're going to go up again, by about 3.5 $2.5 billion again. So if you look overall, during the next two year period, where we're getting this $9.7 billion in property tax relief, actually, property taxes are going to go up during that whole period of time. But about $4.9 billion, that 6% increase over two years, about 3% per year, over two years. Meanwhile, school property taxes are going to decrease a little bit about $790 billion, million dollars, excuse me, but only about 1.8%. So you can see what they're talking about is not going to provide as much property tax relief. It's just it's just not going to do it. And the reason for all that is because the legislature isn't doing anything to control the big problem when it comes to increasing property taxes, which is increasing spending by local governments and school districts. They can keep throwing billions and billions that property tax relief. But unless they throw it up billions just to overwhelm the host whole system. It's not going to do all that much good because cities and counties and special purpose districts and schools continue to spend and spend and spend and spend. They need to do something about that. Before I talk about what they might be able to do on that. Let me just go through the scenario really quickly. And look at the fact what happens if actually The legislature did come up with this $20 billion largest property tax relief effort in history, well, then we would actually see some actual relief actually reduction in property taxes. So for instance, if they put this $20 billion over the next two years into it, property taxes will go down by a billion dollars in 2023. And by about another billion dollars, in 2024. So we will see actual true property tax relief in reductions, property tax cuts, never seen that before. Well, we saw a slight property tax cut back in 2006, when they came up with their $15 billion, but it shot right back up the next year, and it was it was gone. So it's possible we could see this. But still we come to the situation where it's not really going to solve the problem. unless they do something about local spending growth, what can they do? Well, they can really do two things. One is they can impose a tax and expenditure kind of limit, the state of Texas has a tax and expenditure limit, where they can only increase their spending by so much at a local level. I think that's a fine idea. The problem with it is it's new. And it might be done at some point time, but it's gonna take a little while to impose those on local entities. And there'll be a lot of pushback on that. I think the better way that because it's familiar with with folks in the legislature in local districts is, is making school districts and cities and counties and special purpose districts have to go to voters to increase their property tax rates, higher than the no new revenue tax rate. Now, like it is, with most things around the government these days, the no new revenue tax rate doesn't really mean no new revenue for these local taxing entities, it would allow an increase based on new development. So if somebody builds a high rise condo, or there used to be a one storey building, there won't be any limits on the growth of revenue from there. But nonetheless, even with that, you would probably only allow overall the state property taxes to go up by about 2%. Maybe. And that's, you know, without a vote, somewhere like that, that's far better than the 12% we had this year, or the three year running average of about 6% or so, that would be a big thing. If we could put that into place and spend $20 billion on real property tax relief, we can see significant cuts to our overall property taxes, school property taxes would just take a nosedive. And in fact, we'd be on the pathway toward elimination. So it's up to us though, if the Texas legislature doesn't hear from us, they're not going to do this kind of stuff, we're gonna get stuck with a $9 billion property tax relief bill, it really doesn't provide us much relief at all, in the schools and local governments are going to keep spending money. And we're not going to be much better off after this legislative session than when we are now. So if you want a property tax cut, speak up, talk to your legislature, legislators and tell him you want real property tax relief. Well, thanks for joining me here on episode 16 116 at the Liberty Cafe, and thanks once again to Texas scorecard for being our sponsor.Transcribed by https://otter.ai
We are all familiar with the abuse of power by federal agencies such as the FBI, IRS, and CDC. On today’s Liberty Cafe, though, we’ll be talking with Rep. Brian Harrison about his efforts to rein in abuse occurring in Texas state agencies. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text, as robots still have a lot to learn:Bill Peacock 0:17almost everybody's familiar in one form or fashion, about rogue agencies, whether they're at the federal level, or down at the state level, we've probably all seen some kind of examples of unelected bureaucrats determining basically what the law is going to be far beyond what the legislature Congress had passed. And then using their own agency regulations, and sometimes just internal decisions and memorandums to ruin people's lives. On this week's Liberty cafe, we're going to take a look at this and see how, at least down here in Texas, we can do something to rein in these runaway state agencies. Hi, this is Bill Peacock, and welcome to episode 115 of the Liberty cafe. It's a blessing to have you here with me and a blessing to be a part also of the Texas scorecard network, Texas scorecard sponsors of liberty Cafe, and you can find us here at my website, excellent thought.net. Go over to Texas score dark, sorry, Texas scorecard.com. And find us over there along with a lot of other stuff about the battle for Liberty going on here in Texas, and really across the world. So today, as I mentioned, we're gonna talk about state agencies here in Texas, and what we can do to rein them in. And to help us understand this, we're gonna have state representative Brian Harrison on, he has filed three bills in the Texas legislature that are designed to rein in these state agencies and at least put elected officials over the top of them, and in some form or fashion to help control them, but also give us some rights to go after and protect ourselves in courts that we don't really have today. So without further ado, we're going to turn over I interviewed him just a little while ago. And now we're going to go and listen to that. And then I'll be back at the end. I'm with State Representative Brian Harrison today. Representing Harrison, thank you very much for being on the show.Brian Harrison 2:22Bill. It's great to be with you. Thank you very much for having me.Bill Peacock 2:27Well, for those of you who don't know him, let me just introduce you a little bit. So represent Harrison is in his second term representing has district 10 and the Texas legislature which comprise Ellis County, and from what I can tell them at very small parts of Henderson County, it looks like they usedBrian Harrison 2:44to it used to Yeah, when I was elected in a special election, about a year and a half ago, I had Ellis and summer Henderson and Ellis has grown so much I no longer have the Henderson part which so no, none of Henderson anymore. No, unfortunately, not I loved representing the folks in Henderson County.Bill Peacock 2:58Okay. All right. And then he puts you live there and Ellis and with your wife, Tara and four children. So represent Harrison has worked with his wife and father in multiple business enterprises, small businesses and as a consultant as a small business as well. But during the Trump administration, he served in various roles in federal agencies, he was Chief of Staff at the US Department of Health and Human Services, which his bio tells us is the largest government agency in the world. Boy, you know, we could do with less of those. But But I'm glad you were there. And then also the US Department of Defense and the the office of Vice President White House, and then the Office of the Commissioner, Social Security Administration. So represent Harrison, so you filed three bills that had to deal with state agencies and basically getting state agencies off the back of Texas. And but before I you know, before I get into those bills, I'd like us to talk a little bit about your background on this. And I'd love to just start out with this question if I could. So quite often, when I ran across someone with your resume, you know, lots of experience in big federal agencies, I find them on the wrong side of the liberty issue. But that's not the case with you. Right use. And so could you just tell us a little bit about what's your experience in these agencies, led you to come to the place where you're filing these bills, trying to reduce the impact of big agencies on the lives of people?Brian Harrison 4:27Yeah, I do think it surprises a lot of people, that somebody who used to be at the top of the world's largest government agency, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and I'll give you some statistics just to drive that point home that do not make my small government heart happy, but they are true. So people here in Texas, like to brag that, you know, if Texas was its own nation state, we would be the ninth largest economy on Earth. Right? You hear people talking about this all the time. HHS, just my one cabinet agency where I was the Chief of Staff. If HHS was its own nation state, it would be The fifth right behind the United Kingdom. So that the budget here in Texas is about a quarter of a trillion dollars, you know, 250 300 billion. HHS had a budget of $1.4 trillion. When I started it had 26 operating and staff divisions, I had a staff of 85,000 people and 100,000 contractors and just one of our 26 divisions, the FDA regulates one out of every $4 spent in the American economy. So I am very intimately familiar with the power that unelected bureaucrats wield. And you're right, a lot of people who do hold government offices, especially if they're an executive branch agencies, they come out with a different view than me, I was pretty much a small government guy, before I served in these various roles in government, I was pushed even further to the right, based on my experience, or when I watched the unbelievable, I would say, obscene amount of power, that unelected officials at all levels of government, in America. Now, hold on, I'm looking at your backdrop there says the Liberty cafe, I love the name of your show, because, as you know, the chief of government has one job, that job is to protect our liberties. So government doesn't give us our freedoms, those come from our Creator, as you know. And when our founders set up our constitutions, both federally and state, they knew that they recognize that. And they knew that when government acts almost in every instance, by definition, it is depriving somebody of some form of life or liberty or a treasure. And so the hurdle was supposed to be very high for government, to deprive people and to act in that way. The House of Representatives right had to agree word for word with the Senate, and then word for word, with the President of the United States, if the government was going to act, and we all watch Schoolhouse Rock, as as kids, I gotta tell you, I think Schoolhouse Rock should be banned as fake news, because that is not how America works anymore, whatsoever. And so that's a little bit of my perspective on a having just lived through the amount of power that meet myself, nobody elected me. But as the Chief of Staff of a federal agency, I could play a far more material role in in creating federal programs, ending federal programs, creating federal taxes, ending federal taxes than 100 members of the United States Congress put together. And that's just that's just not right. So so I think you highlighting this, the biggest threat to our constitutional system of divided government is the out of control bureaucratic state.Bill Peacock 7:19Yeah, I agree with you 100%. On that, you know, when I worked back at Texas Public Policy Foundation, we used to hire folks. And one question, we would ask them all whether they're going to be policy analyst or accountants, we would ask them, what's the what's the role of government? And if they got beyond three words to protect our rights are four words, the more they got past those four words, the more points they lost, because that's really, that's really what it's all about your I mean, the Bible is so clear about that. And the Constitution is so clear about that. And so if you if you bring your experience down to the Texas state level, I mean, you're in the Texas legislature now. But you're in you're filing a bill about bills about state agencies. Are you seeing some of the same problems and Texas that you saw at the federal level?Brian Harrison 8:07It doesn't make me happy to say this, but yes, I am. And I'll give you one example, the Biden administration, and my former agency, HHS. So HHS also oversees the CDC, and then the NIH. So when the Biden administration a month or two ago decided to put for purely political reasons, and with no clinical data showing safety or efficacy, in the pediatric population, the COVID-19 vaccination on their official recommendation, official childhood immunization schedule, okay. They did this, again, purely for political purposes. And I went out to it to publicly attack the Biden ministration for doing this, because what happens is, when the CDC issues recommendations, they will tell everybody, okay, these things are not binding. The problem is, every blue state and blue localities across the country have their official position is to blindly defer to whatever CDC does. And so what happens is these CDC recommendations have the effect of mandating in this instance, COVID-19 vaccines on millions of Americans, okay, across the country. I thought that decision was appalling. And so I want to go publicly criticizing him. But I said, You know what, I'm elected in the Texas House, I want to make sure that our hand our house is in order on this front, and I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that on our own state health agencies website, they had a requirement on their that every student to attend any university or school institution in Texas, must receive every vaccine that the CDC recommends. So I could not believe this. This was not a decision by the way that was made by the legislature. Right. This was not even a formal regulation that went out. It was a blog post. So I used to joke about this at HHS, we should not govern by blog posts. Okay, so I put that on Twitter, was on the phone with the ex executive commissioner of the state health agency, and I am pleased to report that within 18 hours, they undid That requirement, but it wasn't fact a requirement in the state of Texas that of CDC said something in terms of a student to go to school, you had to get that vaccine and it included the COVID-19 vaccine. We've got instances of unelected bureaucrats at the Texas Medical Board, not doing what we're what we chartered them legislatively to do, which is to regulate the practice of medicine to make sure that patients are cared for and the Hippocratic Oath is is enforced, do no harm. We have the Texas Medical Board right now, not doing what their counterparts in Florida are doing and protecting kids from these disgusting and appalling gender modification procedures there instead of wasting their resources as unelected officials prosecuting and going after doctors who are prescribing safe treatments that have been approved by the FDA for 50 years in the middle of COVID. Trying to save lives. So we have unelected bureaucrats literally prosecuting doctors trying to save lives. While they're allowing child mutilations to happen. In the state of Texas, our legislature, I'll give you two more examples. Our legislature in statute allows one unelected bureaucrat one to buy, eat it, force any vaccine they want on any school child in the state of Texas at anytime they want. One, I would like to bureaucrat and that's current law. One other example, maybe the most extreme example, are disaster laws from the 1970s. They allow anytime a governor determines we're in a state of disaster. So when we're in a state of disaster, as determined by who by the governor, right, then the governor has quite literally the full powers of a king. When we are in a declared state of disaster, a governor can unilaterally delete, duly pass laws, he can unilaterally modify any law, and he can unilaterally create any state law he wants. We absolutely have problems here in the state of Texas that need to be rectified. They need to be rectified immediately, because they do not consist. They do not comport with the principles of representative government.Bill Peacock 11:57That's It's amazing that we live in a state like Texas that we think are free, and we see these kind of things. And real quick, this is a little bit off the topic of your bills. But if I could just ask so I was aware of what you were talking about, you know, the emergency powers of the governor, it's pretty clear that the legislature the Texas Constitution says the legislature gets to pass laws and repeal laws. So it seems to me that a law that says the governor can do that is unconstitutional, yet that never made its way through the courts any Why didn't that happen?Brian Harrison 12:29It's probably it's my guess is I'm not a lawyer. My guess is they had a difficulty, you know, establishing standing for certain people to sue. That's a speculation. I don't know. I agree with you. I believe that that disaster law that we have on the books right now, as we speak in Texas, is on its face on constitutional. And we Texas, I tell you that somebody who spent some of my career outside of DC, Texas has a well earned and robust reputation for being the leader on liberty, individual liberty and on freedoms and on conservative principles and governance. I have to tell you now as somebody who's as an is an elected constitutional officer in the state of Texas, we have a lot of work to do to live up to our reputation. And we need to get about doing it immediately.Bill Peacock 13:12We'll get let's let's dive into your bills a little bit. So before we look at the specific bills, all the bills its House Bill 791. House Bill 1947, and House Bill 1948. All three of those bills, focus on state agency rules. Why did you use agency rules as your target for going after these state agenciesBrian Harrison 13:33very simply, our state constitution just like the federal constitution, wanting to make it very hard for the state of Texas to deprive somebody of life liberty, or to put burdens on them. And unfortunately, just how I said Schoolhouse Rock is fake news. In too many instances. It's also fake news here in Texas, if if an unelected bureaucrat can both write and enforce a law, that is the definition of tyranny. And yet we allow it, we allow it way too much in the state of Texas. So what I did is I said, if something is going to happen, out of an executive branch agency, the people are being deprived of representation unless an elected official, so they had a choice to put an office and somebody who they could remove has a chance to weigh in on that. And in an ideal world, that would be the legislature. But these bills said you know what, if they are as an executive branch agency executing their power, they derive their power in almost all instances from the governor. The governor oversees the executive branch, and thank God the governor in Texas is an elected official so people can boot him out if they want to or him or her. Okay, that's this is agnostic. One thing it's important to note agnostic as to any governor, my bills were not written with any particular governor was in mind. With the one exception. I am terrified of a future governor like Beto O'Rourke, okay. That there is only a matter of time until a Democrat holds that office. We have to make sure that any power we give to any governor, we will be okay with our worst political enemy wielding and that's when we don't give enough thought to so yeah, so one of my bills says you know, If an executive branch agency is going to write something that has the effect of a law, which is what regulations do, okay, you can go to jail if you violate them, if they have the effects of a law, the governor, I'm trying to empower him as the state's highest elected official, he needs to put his name on that regulation. He needs to have authority, he needs to have responsibility. And if that involves capability, even better, but it empowers him to rein in the bureaucrats that all work for him. And then the second bill that you referenced is what's reining in something that most people haven't heard of. It's called Chevron deference. What it basically is when people see you know, they go into a courthouse, they see Lady Liberty blindfolded with the scales in her hand, right? Everybody's familiar with this justice is supposed to be blind, did you? Or did you not violate a regulation or a law? The problem is, when government agencies harm individuals or businesses in Texas, and they want to fight back and say, Hey, what you're doing is inappropriate. You don't have the power to do this, or it's already illegal and illegal action. Well, we adjudicate these things in the courts. Okay. So but when you go to court, the judge, the jury, and the whole process is supposed to be indifferent. That's why Lady Liberty is blindfolded. The problem is it both at the federal level, and at the state level, we have government sanctioned cheating, they go to the courts. And because of something called Chevron deference, the courts when weighing a matter between an individual or business on one hand, and a government bureaucratic agency on the other, they literally are authorized to cheat. If it's even a close call, what they say is, you know, this was kind of close, we're gonna go ahead and just side with the government's a close ball, we can't tell that is not supposed to be the way our criminal juris, the judicial system in Texas works. And so I think it's an immoral practice. And I filed a bill to end it and require the courts treat both parties equally, you cannot put your thumb on the scale for the bureaucrats at the expense of hard working individual Texas.Bill Peacock 16:57Yeah, I agree completely. One would hope that our courts would review any decisions made by an agency from the point of our constitutional rights rather than the opinion of state agency? What Why do you think that isn't happening?Brian Harrison 17:14It's a good question. It's been a process that has taken a while for us to get here. But however we got here, we need to stop it immediately.Bill Peacock 17:21Right. And even you know, we've got an in Texas, a supreme court that's been Republican for 20 plus years or something like that. And they haven't done anything to stop it either. So it seems like this is going to have to be a legislative solution rather than a judicial solution.Brian Harrison 17:38Yeah, absolutely. And look, I mean, this is not a completely made up scenario, what I'm about to describe to you, if we don't rein this in, if we had a future governor, like somebody like a Beto O'Rourke, who was sworn into office to lead to lead, Texas, the official position of the CDC is that firearm violence is a public health crisis. A future governor of the state of Texas, if we do not change things could say, you know, what the federal government's official position is that firearm violence is a public health crisis. I agree with the CDC, I'm gonna declare a public health emergency disaster in Texas, and I'm gonna confiscate firearms, or I agree with the federal government's EPA, that emissions oppose a national security, economic and public health threat. I'm going to declare a disaster in Texas, and I'm going to ban the internal combustion engine, and I'm going to ban vehicles, I'm going to shut down every automotive dealer and I'm going to confiscate your cars under current Texas statutes. And especially when you lay around the concept of Chevron deference, which lets the courts, aside with the government, over individuals who had their rights taken away, that could happen. People need to understand that and know that we've got to fix this problem.Bill Peacock 18:44Well, I think we've seen over the last few years, things happen even in Texas, that we didn't imagine were possible. And in part through the the instruments that you're talking about right now. So Well, I wish you the very best with this legislation. If there's anything that I can do, you know, write my congressman, or representative or whatever, let me know, because I think this is one of the most important bills as I told you, before, we went online, you know, having spent about eight years and agencies myself, I've seen rogue agencies all over the place, and we need to do something to to bring those to an end. So thank you very much for doing this. And thank you for being on the Liberty Cafe today.Brian Harrison 19:26Always great to be with you, Bill. And I think you're doing the most important thing, which is highlighting the problem that unfortunately, far too many Americans including too many Texans are unaware of. And if we do not rein in the out of control bureaucratic state, or individuals who are not elected can both write and enforce laws in Texas. freedom loving Texas, is unfortunately on the road to a post constitutional era. And we got to do everything we can to stop that and make sure that people are empowered through their elected representatives. So thank you very much, Bill.Bill Peacock 19:53All right. Thank you. You bet. Well, I really appreciate representative Harrison being on liberty Cafe today, and thanks again. All of you for listening, and thanks once again to Texas scorecard for being our sponsor.Unknown Speaker 20:05Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen to. I'll see you next time.Transcribed by https://otter.ai
As conservatives and Christians, we often have to figure out how to respond to people, such as liberals and unbelievers, who are on the other side. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, though, we are going to discuss how to engage with those who are on our side, but who also might be aiding and abetting the enemy. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text, as robots still have a lot to learn.In the world of faith and politics, we're always going to run across people who disagree with us. Sometimes those folks are going to be on the other side, we might even look at them as our enemies. Then there are those folks who are on our side, but it looks like they might be giving what we would call aid and comfort to the enemies. So the question then becomes, how do we deal with the folks who are on our side, but doing what we see is really irreparable harm to the causes we are fighting for. That's going to be our topic of discussion today, on Episode 114, the Liberty cafe. Hi, my name is Bill Peacock, blessing to have you here with me listening to the Liberty Cafe today, whether you're doing it driving down the road, or, or maybe sitting out in your backyard, or just maybe falling asleep, hopefully, I'll keep you awake long enough that she can get through most of the podcasts before you for those off. But anyway, thanks for being here today. And also thanks very much to the folks over Texas scorecard, the sponsor for the Liberty cafe, what a blessing it is to have them here supporting the work I'm doing. And we're all doing for fighting for liberty, and freedom here in our country and across the world. So I mentioned at the beginning, that I want us to talk about today how to deal with people we disagree with. And let me just start this off by reading a quote. This is from Henry van til he's a theologian. And he said that one cannot keep on evangelizing the world without interfering with the world's culture. So he's obviously coming at this from a Christian perspective. And and what he's saying there are leading us toward is that if we are Christians, and we're doing our jobs, we're going to be interfering with what the world is trying to do. Because of course, the world is trying to turn us all away from God, they're trying to rebel against God, they are trying to reject Him as rulers. That's what they talk God talked about in Psalm two, right? They are they are wanting to seeking to cut the cords with God. But of course, they can't do that. And so they get really angry at people, like Christians who come and remind them of who is Lord and God and Savior. So it's a given that Christians, and particularly Christians, well, Christians who are preaching the gospel, are going to make enemies and Christians who are teaching the whole council of God's world. So that would typically be and you have to be careful with all these labels, but but conservative Christians, those who are promoting free markets, which I would suggest is a biblical truth, that, that we need a lot less government than we need today. And you can go straight to the Bible and find these kinds of things. So those Christians who are preaching the gospel and preaching the whole counsel of God are going to make enemies, because that's the way the world works. And so we have to figure out how to deal with them. But I'd really like us to talk today about so we might call these people enemies of the state. Let's just think about it that way. But then I'd really like us to think about, for the topic of this show today, how to deal with the people who take many of the same perspectives that the folks on the other side do. But they're on our side, right? It's a very difficult thing to know how to do. So for instance, just in my case, I've been working in the public policy field, Texas politics for a long time, 30 plus years. And I used to have to sit up in the the lobby, or the the balcony up in the Texas legislature in the House chamber in the Senate chamber. And so during the late at nights, during the end of session, you just have to kind of sit there and watch wait for things to happen. So I was doing that one session, I don't know, maybe eight years ago or something like that. And my son was up there with me because my wife brought him up to the capitol and he just hung out with me and we looked at stuff and I showed him around and what was going on down there on the Capitol floor. This was over in the Texas House side. And and so this one guy came walking down the aisle there in the Texas House chamber, and I pointed to him and I told my son Hey, that guy you yelled at me one time. And now I started looking around. And I was able to count for, I think it was four or five members of the Texas House of Representatives who had yelled at me at one point in time, I can add one or two Texas senators who have done the same thing. And so they've and guess what they were all Republicans. Which is kind of crazy. Because I'm a Republican, well, I guess I'm a Republican, I generally vote Republican, although I get a little upset with Republicans, and it made me that's really what was going on here. Because I'm a conservative, I deal with legislators all the time. And generally, when I deal with Democrats, we may disagree with each other a lot. Some may even get angry at the things that I'm saying, but they don't yell at me. Because they know who I am. Right? They understand my positions on things. So they may try and oppose me. But they typically don't personally attack me. But with Republicans, who are supposedly on my side, the Democrats are on the other side, Republicans are on my side, but they get really angry, why did they get angry at me? Well, because I was representing position as conservative. And typically, these folks would get mad at me when I'd go into a committee hearing or into their office and say, look, the bill you're sponsoring or the bill, you're gonna vote for the bill, you're gonna let out your committee is just not conservative. And they don't like that, because they want to tell their voters back home, that they're conservative, so they can get elected as Republicans. And they don't like it when somebody comes up, and maybe exposes that, that they're not quite as conservative as they want to. And so that's an example of what I'm talking about, about how to deal me. And they to, I suppose, how to deal with folks who are on their side. But we have significant disagreements about things. Now, when it comes to politics. In some ways, it's kind of it's clear. They're Democrats were Republicans. But on the other hand, it's not quite so much, because they, some of these guys who call themselves Republicans, I can think of several folks in Texas politicians who call themselves Republicans, who I don't think, are Republicans at all in the sense that they stand for the the basic fundamentals that Republicans have stood for over time. Just think of it faith, family, and liberty, perhaps, I think they're really on the other side. But it's, it's a little more challenging. From one sense, it's clear, but it's also more challenging when we move her over to faith, right? Because the fact of the matter is, if somebody is really and truly a Christian, they're on my side, it doesn't matter how wrong they are. Again, this is from my perspective, I'm sure they have their own perspective about what I think and, and, you know, are we as conservatives, because I'm putting myself out here as a Christian conservative. They have their own opinions about what I think but it doesn't matter how wrong they are. If they are Christians, they're on my side. And so, you know, this could be the case, whether we're talking about race woke racism, that they're pushing up their white privilege, or they're talking about the age of the Earth, they think the earth is really old. I don't think it is. It could be about abortion. I've met Christians who are pro abortion, who claim they're a Christians and, you know, the best I could tell they were right. And all these kind of woke politics that people are pushing out there, many of whom would be Christians and Republicans, right. But if they're Christians, it doesn't matter how woke they are. They're on my side, because we're both Christians. We were God's enemy at one point in time. But then God gave us new hearts, and called us to Himself through Jesus Christ. And now we are all on God's side together. And because they're on God's side, I'm on God's side, we're on the same side. You know, this is all by God's grace. I didn't just sign up one day said, Hey, I'm gonna be go from being an enemy to God to a friend of God, because I wouldn't have made that decision and nobody does. But by God's grace, given us this new heart, and calling us to him, we become we make we make that move over to his side. So that raises this important question again, of how do they treat these folks who are convinced that I'm convinced are wrong about what the Bible says? They're wrong about how to apply the Bible to our lives, maybe in print ticularly they're wrong when applying the Bible to culture and politics. Well, you know, in one sense, it's easy for me to think of them as traitors. And that might not be too far off, let me read the definition of treason or the treason clause, or the giving aid and comfort clause from the US Constitution. This is Article Three, section three clause one, treason against the United States, so consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession, an open court. And so if I really believe what the Bible is telling me about these things, what God has said about certain things on public policy on woke racism, Marxism, economic issues, while I realize that these are not things that go to the heart of salvation, because to be saved, all I have to do is confess Christ as Lord and Savior with my heart, and call on Him as my Lord and Savior and believe that He is the things and I'll be safe. Just to have to ask him for these things, again, by God's grace, and I'm saved, right? And so, but still, if people are out there misrepresenting God's word, they're doing great harm to the sight of God, and the gospel is being presented. It just does great damage to that. And in fact, I think it's not too far afield to say that they are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And that when we get to the end of the road, somewhere down the road, that we will look back and see, of course, we will all have done this. In our hearts, we sin and a lot of different ways. So I'm not trying to hold myself up or other conservative Christians up any higher than I am folks who would take more work positions or something, but I think we will see that in the specific area of public policy and politics. Some folks, at least, we're doing great harm to the spread of God's kingdom and his culture by misrepresenting the Word of God. So I have to, so I think traitorous is one way we could talk about describing these folks. But it has to make it clear, they're not traitors in the fact that they've gone over to the other side. They're traitors in the sense that they've given aid and comfort to the enemies. And there's going to have to be some consequences from that. Right. So that leads to the question, how do I deal with these folks who are preaching or teaching or having discussions or raising kids or engaging in politics in ways that are harmful? To what I would say the kingdom of God is to what God's counsel is to the world? Well, I think there's really two categories of folks on that there's the leaders in the church, that would be elders, or pastors, or however you want to describe the folks like that Deacons in your church, who are leaders. And then of course, in politics, there's the politicians, right. I think, one time, sometimes we make a mistake of treating these folks differently. And but I think really, that's a mistake. We owe them all. Respect. We owe them all love. And we need to come to them as people on the same side as Christians, yes, conservatives, and say, you know, we love you, but you're just wrong. Because they can be wrong, for instance. You go back to Ezekiel, and we see that in there that, that Ezekiel is prophesying about the shepherds of Israel. He's told by God, in fact, to prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. Why? Why are they doing that? Why is he supposed to do that? Well, because God says, the shepherds are feeding themselves rather than feeding the sheep. Now, does that sound familiar? To us? It certainly does. I think when it comes to politicians, I'd suggest it also does when it comes to thinking of elders in the church. Not all elders, not all politicians. I would hope that there's fewer elders doing this and there are politicians, but nonetheless, when they when they're out there eating the fat and clothing themselves, rather than feeding the sheep. That's a problem and we need to hear hold them accountable, whether we're elders or politicians, or just just the people, right, that's the way God set up government. We're in my church, and in most churches that don't have the Catholic Episcopal type of hierarchy Lutheran, we elect people and we send them into office, in a church, it's the same thing we do. In politics today. Matter of fact, the Democratic Republic form of government here in the United States is basically a biblical, Presbyterian form of governance. And that's the way it's set up. And so I think we need to, to reach out to folks who are on the other side and speak to them. But one thing we have to do keep in mind is that God's really in charge of all this, and let me just read this last passage from the, from the Ezekiel passage in Ezekiel 34, he says, I will require my sheep at their hand and put a stop to their feeding the sheep, no longer shall the shepherds feed themselves, I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, that they may not be food for them. Right. So no matter how much bad stuff is going on out there, whether the bad stuff is from the enemies of God, or to folks on our side, who are aiding and abetting enemies of God, God's in charge of all this, right. And so when we approach folks who are on our side who are doing bad, we have to put it in this perspective, we have to have the comfort that comes from knowing that God is Lord, and He is ultimately going to take care of all this. And but that doesn't mean though, we don't have responsibilities to deal with this. Because we do we and we need to speak clearly to people on our side who are messing up. For instance, let me just read this passage from Galatians 211 through 14. This is where Paul confronts Peter in public about Peters false teaching about what it when it comes to the issue between Jews and Gentiles. And you know, it's all about the Judaizers. And do you have to become a Jew? Before you can become a Christian back in these days, because there were some people were saying you had to do this. And Peter was back and forth on this somewhat, but but he was confused at times, and he was on the wrong side and this and so let me just read what Paul, it says about Paul. And Paul wrote about how he treated Peter. And Peter is called Sefa seer, because that was one of his names. But when Cifas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James he was eating with the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically, with along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said, to see if us before them all, if you though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews. So here we have a really great example of how we can treat people on our side, we can speak boldly to them, we can speak, be courageous in our speech, we can speak the truth to them. And Jesus did similar things when he was talking to folks, although quite often, he was talking to Pharisees who really were on the other side. So we have to temper that. But nonetheless, here's a situation with Paul and Peter, where they're both clearly on the same side. So we can speak that way. But we always have to speak also with love and respect, coming from our hearts. And again, that acknowledgement that God really is in charge of all this. And we need to rest in that. And we also need to be ready to accept correction from others. Right? When we're making the mistakes, whether it's in politics, or economics, or religion, or just in our own personal lives, we need to respond with humility, when others come to correct us on these types of things as well. And that's because we have to speak out because the stakes are really big, right? The entire culture, the entire world is up for grabs. I mean, this is true. It's gonna they're gonna go to you know, one way or it's gonna go the other way. Now, the good news is for us Christians is that we know that Christ already rules the world. He's our King, and he's not just Christian's King, he's the king of the whole world. And so we also know that one day, his rule will be acknowledged by all, Jesus is going to win this battle. So you don't have to worry about the outcome. But again, this doesn't mean that we can just sit back and wait for all this to happen. Because for some mysterious reason, that is just really impossible to fathom. God has given us the task of being the army for Christ's victory. We're the shock troops. Some of us are the shock troops for this. Some of us are the infantry. Some of us are the logistics personnel. Some of us are the cooks and bottle washers, but we're all Christians in the army of God. We've been drafted and we have to perform our duty. And we also know that some people who aren't in the army right now, who will be they will be in the army. And that's a key responsibility of Christians, right is to maintain that effort, not just to make the world look the way God wants it to, but to bring others from where we used to be into God's army and onto God's side. Let me just finish with another quote here from Henry van til who kind of helps explain what that means. What that looks like, it devolves upon God's people, therefore, to contend for such a society which will give the maximum opportunity for us to live holy Christian lives, and the maximum opportunity for others to become Christians. Christians, we have work to do. So let's go out there and do it. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen to. I'll see you next time.Transcribed by https://otter.ai
After a break of four years, school choice is once again a big topic in the Texas Legislature. On this week’s episode of the Liberty Cafe, we discuss whether school choice can fix what is wrong with public education. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text, as robots still have allot to learn.School choice is back on the agenda in the Texas legislature this session. That's nothing new, of course, advocates have been fighting for school choice in the Texas legislature for at least the last 30 years. But there's been a hiatus of light. It was big news back in 2017 2018. But in the 2018 general election, a lot of Republicans including Dan, Patrick kind of squeaked by over the finish line to get reelected. And they went stone cold dead, when it comes came to public education, choice choice for parents to give them the ability to put their kids in either public or private schools using taxpayer dollars. And, in fact, they went the other way, advocating for huge pay increases for teachers and more money for public education. But for some reason, they're back on the school choice bandwagon. They haven't moved away from their support for public schools, they're getting more money than ever, but at least there's talk about giving parents some opportunity to get their kids out of these godless, generally not very good public schools. That's what we're going to talk about today, on episode 113 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, this is Bill Peacock, and welcome to Liberty cafe, it's always a blessing to have you joining me in on the Liberty cafe and listening to the show. It's also a blessing to be part of the Texas scorecard network. They're the sponsor of liberty Cafe, and I encourage you to go over to Texas scorecard.com, and find out all the great things that they're doing to promote liberty and freedom and justice in the state of Texas. Alright, so let's take a look at this. You know, there's a there's a problem with public schools. And well, actually, there's a lot of problems with public schools. And this has been going on for a long time. So I kind of want to walk us through some of the problems with public schools. So we'll understand the drive for school choice parental choice. And then think about whether school choice actually solves those problems are not. Right. So so first of all, the first big problem that's easy to point out is that there's a runaway spending problem when it comes to public education, not just in Texas, but across the United States. Interestingly, United States generally spends far more on public education than any other industrial first world country in the world, it's pretty amazing how much more we spend here. It's just like, there's much more pro abortion sentiment in the United States than there is anywhere else you would think that a country with our background founded on Christian principles, and with a strong conservative component would not be in the situation, but we are. So let's just take a look here at what it looks like here in Texas when it comes to taxes and spending for public education. So back in 2018 19, that's school years, starting in the fall, and moving to the spring, total school district expenditures in Texas worth $63 billion. Today, well, not today. But in the current in the school year that ended just last May or June, Spinney was up to $72.6 billion that's running up over $12,000. When you take all the costs and in place over $12,000 per child, nowhere else in the developed world world can you find those kinds of per student expenditures and the girl it just keeps growing? Right 63 billion to 72 billion. That's a $9 billion just over the course of four school years. It just continues to grow. But of course, somebody's got to pay for all that spending that somebody is you and me. And one of the main ways that we pay for public schools is through property taxes, school districts. Pay, spent a lot of money. Matter of fact, school districts constitute the largest single portion of almost anybody's tax bill, I thought. So I used to live in Austin, and moved out near Dripping Springs but out in the county and I figured well, I'm not going to be in a city. So my tax bill ought to go down pretty much because I don't have to pay city of Austin taxes. Well, it did go down but not nearly as much as I thought it would because the property taxes for Dripping Springs ISD are significantly higher than they were back in Austin. It doesn't matter where you live. Public education is very expensive. But the school districts know it's really expensive. And they know, taxpayers don't like to pay for it. The Texas taxpayers have been revolted against property taxes, all the way back to the very beginnings of the property taxes back in the 1840s and 50s. And it's just continued on from there. So the school districts have gotten pretty good about lying to their constituents. It's not to school districts, cities like to lie to their voters and counties like to lie to their voters to but school districts seem to just have taken it to the to a new level. Let me just read you just a little bit about Fort Bend. ISD. That's a school district right outside of Houston. Fort Bend ISD, as a school district southwest of Houston already said that, not satisfied with increasing its property tax revenue from existing properties. By the 2.5% limit without voter approval, the school board's district of Trustee Board of Trustees asked voters to approve a tax increase of over 7%. This past year, they would have used the new revenue to increase the pay of starting teachers by $1,000 up to $60,000, and provided supplemental payments to all teachers and staff. Get this the district attempted to sell this tax hike with it sustaining the tax rate campaign. The campaign told voters that the 2023 tax rate will be the same as last year's without mentioning that the district's revenue will increase by $47.66 million dollars. And homeowners tax bills will go up 7%. However, taxpayers saw through the campaign and voted against increasing the rate. Now, I do have to say that. Okay, did they actually lie? Did the school board actually lie to the taxpayers because it's true, the rate would not have gone up whatever the rate was before, it would have stayed the same. But the reason that was the case, because property values have gone up so much, that they could keep the rate the same and still bring in a lot more tax dollars. So they weren't lying about the rate staying the same. But you have to see the deceit in something like this, where they are trying to convince the voters that, oh, don't worry about it, no new, no new taxes, no tax increases, by trying to tell them that their rates weren't going to go up. And this kind of stuff goes on all the time across the state of Texas, I'm so glad that the voters in Fort Bend County in the in the district voted against that sort of thing. And you got to also remember that Fort Bend County has kind of turned democratic over the last few years. And so you know, it's it's tending to go that way. So it's not just conservatives that don't like higher school taxes. Now, we go from the spending side of things and the taxing side to things to the grooming side of things, particularly the grooming of Texas Children. Now, that's a rather new term grooming, and we use it obviously in the context of homosexuals or pedophiles, to be more precise, pedophiles, grooming, children, for there to be abused, right. And now, more recently, it's been used for homosexual and, and a lot of other just liberal grooming, to groom children to ignore and turn against the values that their parents have been trying to teach them at home. So that's what's going on. But but this is, again, been going on for a long, long time and what the real grooming of children is that has been going on in in public schools, not just in Texas, but across the United States has been to turn them away from God. And this was the primary focus of Horace Mann, John Dewey, who were early advocates back in the 1870s, mid 1800s, of public education, they wanted to take kids out of their homes, get them away from their parents, and teach them to be model citizens. That model citizen generally would have nothing to do with Jesus Christ and Christianity. Let me just read this little excerpt from this guy, John cubberly cubberly No one did more than man to establish in the minds of the American people. The conception that education should be universal, non sectarian meaning non religious, and free, and that its aim should be social efficiency, civic virtue, virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends. So there we have what man, and Dewey and others in the early public education establishment wanted to do. They wanted to promote this civic virtue and social efficiency turn children basically into robots, that did what the society wanted them to do, not what their parents were trying to get them to do by teaching them about Jesus Christ, about their need for salvation, their need to turn away from their sinfulness and turn to Christ as Lord and Savior. And then all the different characteristics and actions that come out of that the way God would have a slip to be holy, before his face. So public schools have been trying to groom children in this way, for a long time. It's just that they've been so successful about it. I mean, you know, that, even if they haven't been pushing a radical left wing agenda for decades, 100, more than 100 years, they've been telling kids that there's no need to learn about God, to learn about mathematics, or to learn about natural sciences, or English or anything else. What Why do you need to learn about God, he's just the creator of heaven and earth, and created us along with it. But but that's the opposite view. So kids have been growing up for all these years, thinking, Well, you know, we don't really need to know about this and that and the other. And then we wonder why our religious ability to provide religious education is continuing to fall away, people not knowing the importance of Christ in all areas of life. So that's been so successful now that we've they've really ramped it up to the next level. And we've seen what that looks like, right? We've, we've got the homosexual agenda being promoted. We have this extra peripheral article, parents in the north Texas City of Keller spoke at their local school board meeting Monday to demand more transparency from officials about six sexually explicit books found in their kids campus libraries. There are a lot of parents out there that don't know what's going on. When local father said, these books are not meant for kids. I don't have to tell you probably the kind of content that is in these kinds of things, I mean, graphic pictures of or drawings of people having sex, homosexual sex, heterosexual sex. It's in graphic descriptions of these these things, and just pushing the homosexual agenda, the heterosexual agenda of sex outside of marriage, all these kinds of things are going on. In the public schools today. We've also seen and heard about critical race theory going on in public schools. And you know, Texas, educators, a lot of Texas educators, anyway, have responded to that by saying they're concerned that they won't be able to have have open conversations about what's happening in the world, if the Texas Legislature and others concerned about this, you know, pass legislation that restricts how teachers can discuss current events in the classroom. Right. They want to inculcate your children with Marxist ideas about race, and economics and government and society. And they're really concerned that the legislature might stop them from being able to do that, so that you instead of they will be the primary influence on your children. Right. But of course, it's not just what they're teaching in public schools are not teaching in public schools. There the safety of children actually has gone become really threatened in many ways. Right. We just heard recently about prosper Independent School Board. School board member, Drew Wellborn. Having been arrested and charged with indecency with a child by sexual contact right now. Don't know who that child is, apparently wasn't in the school district. But but at the same time, the Prosper ISD had has also been embroiled in this in a sex abuse scandal where there were problems where their daughters had endured months of molestation by Prosper ISD but bus driver and the superintendent there and the school board have just tried to cover it up and stop parents from being able to know about things or complain about things or to make drive any changes in the school district, right. And Wellborn was one of those folks who was doing that. So, but you don't have to be a real child sexual predator. Like he may be a court if he's found guilty of those charges, in order to cover up and promote practices that allow those kinds of things to go on in public schools. And of course, this kind of thing is not just here in Texas, we almost all of us have heard about what went on in Luton County, in Virginia that kind of propelled the current governor of Virginia, whose name just escapes me right now to be the new governor of Virginia where a girl was two girls were actually molested by a young man who dressed up as a woman, and then was able to go into girls bathrooms and molest women in that way. Right. So this is a real problem. It's not just what our students are learning, which is a big enough problem. But even the safety of our children are being compromised. So that puts us back into the conversation of thinking about school choice, right. And of course, school choice, there's multiple ways you can do it. But basically, the main idea is giving parents money, not their money, but money from somebody else, the government, or some other entity, and you're allowing them to use that money to take their kids out of public school, and put them in a private school somewhere else. And that that program has been going on. In the United States, it's really been, you know, over the last 40 years or so, that's kind of come to place, the most famous one out there is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I believe that's still going on. And it's happening out in Arizona, and a few other places. Louisiana tried to do some stuff, I think that might have been thrown out by the courts, but but the idea is, is that get your parents out of these these kids out of out of the public schools, because they're failing them in some form or fashion. It not surprisingly, blacks seem to be the most excited about doing this. So I saw a recent poll by just for the kids, and they had about 53% of whites liked the idea of school choice vouchers, some kind of voucher system, but the numbers were up in the 60s for the black community. And again, that's not a surprising thing, because blacks tend to be stuck in inner cities. Not Not always, but tend to be. And in the worst schools, the why that is the case, we could have a long conversation about it. So the idea is get these kids out of these public schools and let them their parents decide where they can go. And it's not just for their safety, although that's often part of it, particularly with inner city schools and violence and those kinds of things. But to get them out of this inculcation is grooming, where the schools are trying to teach them, to ignore God, and to listen to Marx instead, right? So, again, Dan Patrick is now gung ho for public school choice after several years of just pushing aside out of fear for his political re elections. That's what it seems like to me anyway. And so the basic plan is to take some kind of tech money from the state of Texas, and give it to a limited amount of students. So this limited amount of students can use that to get out of schools. You know, they they've talked about exempting rural Texas from this plan. So real Texas, couldn't get in there. There's all kinds of ways to limit because the public school lobby goes crazy over this. And a lot of Republicans who have, who have in their districts have particularly suburban districts, they go crazy over this too, because their school districts are going crazy over it. And they don't want to put up with the heat. So they're putting some kind of limited plan in place. We don't know what it's going to look like yet. But the question is, does this really solve the problem? And I'd say no, the problem with public schools is that today, you can't talk about God. You can't teach your children about God and public schools. And so it's creating a godless society, and we walk around us and we feel that this isn't going to fix this problem. Particularly if you allow just a few kids to get out or they're in ghosts on to a private school somewhere else. But I will say that if we are going to do something like this, we shouldn't have it being a voucher system. because what a voucher system does, they're going to spend more money on education. It's not like they're, we're going to save a lot of money on this, they're going to take money out of some other part of the budget and put more of it into education. But that extra part is going to go just into this voucher program over here, the better way to do it, I would suggest is to have a system of tax credits, where people can take money. And instead of paying either their property taxes, and that would be both people who own property and corporations that own property, or corporations who pay franchise taxes, they can take money out of the public education system, and give scholarships to other people, either. If you have, if you pay enough property taxes yourself, you can take your own money, but most people can't do that. So you could go to some other business, who's setting up the scholarship programs and use their tax credits, or tax credits that they get to pay for your own public education. Now, the benefit of that is that instead of expanding public money that's going into public education, it's actually reducing the money going into public education, it actually shrinks the public education system, it's not perfect, because we still have so many sides, besides parents paying for their schools. And but at least it's it's a charitable type of thing. It's still government still involved. But it's a charitable type of thing where people can go get funds from private businesses to do this. As long, you know, and businesses aren't going to be perfect about this and the way they operate. But I guarantee you, allowing parents to get money from businesses, and all kinds of businesses could pop up, it's not just going to be the big multibillion dollar companies that you know, already are trying to take the the cancel culture, into our personal lives. All kinds of good businesses out there run by good people, I think could take advantage of this, and could set up all kinds of scholarship funds that a lot of kids could get out of public education, and go into Christian schools, and learn about God and move forward in both bringing Christianity back into the culture through the education system funded by these credits, and also reducing the size of the public education. The godless public education that is system is currently trying to groom our children and take them away from her parents. Well, thank you very much for being with me. On this week's Liberty cafe. It's been a blessing to be here with you and please go over to Texas scorecard.com and see what you can do to join the fight for liberty. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about the show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen I'll see you next time.Transcribed by https://otter.ai
The last time a state–California–tried to create a fake electricity market, it led to the collapse of the grid and the Enron scandal. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we examine the possibility that Texas could face another Enron-type scandal as the state’s PUC attempts to make up its own fake electricity market. This Podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text, as robots still have a lot to learn:Some of my listeners may remember the Enron scandal back in the early 2000s, Enron was like Houston company run by Ken Lay, and was making billions of dollars, trading in energy markets and doing all kinds of things which turned out to be not necessarily necessarily all legal and not necessarily all profitable. But it looked really good for a while, in fact, Enron actually bought naming rights to where they use an Astros play. So what is now a Minute Maid Park used to be in Ron field. But that all came to a collapse. When a lot of things were exposed the illegal activities and just the the nature of some of the investments and activities they were engaged in? Well, it could be based on what the Public Utility Commission of Texas is doing, and in remaking the Texas electricity market that we may be looking forward. And maybe not that far in the future to another Enron scandal here in Texas. I will talk more about that, on this week's episode 112 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, this is Bill peacock. It is a blessing today, as it always is, is a blessing to have you listening in to the Liberty cafe. And it's always blessed to be sponsored by and blessed by the good folks over Texas scorecard. Go to Texas scorecard.com, find out all the great things they're doing, listen to other podcasts over there, and read their articles and just see what you can do to get more engaged in the battle for liberty. The battle for political liberty, of course, is an important one. But even more than that, is the battle for the liberty of our souls, being freed from our sin so that we can walk in Liberty, and then expect that liberty in the political office and the political world. But the only way that liberty comes to us first is through Jesus Christ. So go on over to Texas scorecard and keep listening here. And we'll keep talking about these issues. Well, as I mentioned, it's a possibility that Texas could be heading for another Enron scandal. Why would I say that based on what the Public Utility Commission is doing? Well, first, let's just go back and briefly talk about what Enron did. So Enron had this huge business, and they were not so much in the business of producing energy, but trading in energy and developing energy products. And, and a lot of it turned out to not be very real. But they had these these fantastically complex financial statements that were confusing, not just your average shareholder, but also to analysts, they didn't know quite what to make of these, these financial statements that were being put out. But that didn't stop them from all, at least for most of them, and for a long time, placing great value on the company itself. And then they also had this very complex business model. That in then also, some unethical practices were taking place. And so ultimately, this led the company to using accounting practices that misrepresented earnings. And because if their earnings died down, the company value was going to just go kaput. They also did things like modifying their balance sheets to indicate a more favorable performance. And then they just they went into a lot of, like I said before speculative business ventures, which just really proved disastrous, and then they gave huge compensation packages to a lot of these executives, who turned out to be not really bringing that much value to the company. So what Enron did, and a lot of these deals were just wrong. And they went out of business. When their company just collapsed, basically, their president Ken Lay was convicted along with a lot of other people. He actually died before he he was vacationing in the few months before he was sentenced to jail and he died of a heart attack. You know, no doubt probably brought on a little bit. All the stress by this, this whole event. And then, Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm for Enron also went out of business now that wasn't really because Arthur Andersen as a whole went did something wrong. Maybe, maybe not. Some of their accountants or partners did some bad stuff, and maybe not. But this was clearly prosecutorial abuse that went after Arthur Andersen and, you know within probably a year or so of the there being the company being convicted of a crime which meant they couldn't operate anymore. Basically, they were exonerated the courts of appeals courts throughout their convictions, but by them, there was no longer any Arthur Andersen. So we always have to look at these things from from the perspective of what the Justice Department is doing in these types of things. And this was a perfect example. It's like the abuses and Watergate, the abuses and the Trump, Russia collusion thing, the abuses that are going on now in the FBI, those kinds of things. So we always have to keep those in mind. But that doesn't mean that Enron just wasn't a bad company. But relating this back to the Texas electricity market. What we have here is we need to talk about briefly is Enron's activities out in California. So this was, in some ways, quite different, related, but still quite different from what they were doing in a lot of their other businesses. So back in the late 1990s, there was this electricity restructuring craze, I mean, and it was going on everywhere, California and Texas and New York and Ohio. And a lot of states, at least a third maybe if not a few more than that. Were three because liberals and conservatives all agreed that the old rate of return system where the Pete The Public Utility Commission told a generator to go out and spend $2 billion building a generation plant, and that they would get 8.65% return on investment on an annual basis was not serving consumers. It was expensive. It was unwieldly unwieldly. And it just didn't work for consumers. It made their electricity more expensive, particularly in light of cheap natural gas. And so everybody went around restructuring or bringing introducing competition into their electricity market, Texas did it. And they were the only ones who did it all the way and made it work really well. As we know today, if you've been listening to Liberty cafe, the PUC is in the process of destroying what's left of competition in the Texas electricity market. They've been working on this for a little over a decade now about a decade now. Just reducing time and time again. Well, okay, really, about 15 years, but reducing competition that the legislature put into it and the early PC put into the market. It's just been going away. And this thing they're doing right now will probably be the last step. But California did it just like Texas did, except they didn't do it very well, which is no surprise because I said liberals and conservatives alike agreed on this, but but the liberals in many cases, and particularly out in California just couldn't bring themselves to actually let competition get into the market. So what they did out in California was created an electricity market. That wasn't really an electricity market, they created a fake quasi electricity market. That was not the market at all, but a bunch of rules and mechanisms and all these kinds of things, that the regulator's out in California thought was what a market actually looked like. But it wasn't one in our market actually looked like it wasn't the market at all, it was this, this quasi market kind of structure that they thought would function like a market. But it would protect consumers from all these terrible companies who you just can't let them work in a market by themselves because they're going to be their consumers. And so they made this this this market up that would protect consumers? Well, it actually did the very author opposite, because what happened out there was, you know, these people in the state agencies, they're just not as smart as the people in the private sector. And they don't really understand business, they don't really understand competition, they don't really understand markets. What they understand is they want to control stuff. So that it's not that they're not smart. They have some smarts about them. But they're not very wise. And the people in the market are smarter, and wiser, not necessarily always wise from a biblical standpoint where they want to always do the right thing, but still have a lot more smarts than the regulators. And so when California built this market and thought they would protect consumers, the folks at Enron looked at and said, we know how to game this market. You can always try and gain markets, but in a really competitive, true market. Competition takes care of all that. What happens is when you get a bunch of regulations, put on top of this that starts slowing things down. And then when you get the government just to create this market kind of thing. That's when the problems really get bad because Enron went in there and rigged and figured out how to manipulate and game the system and made hundreds of millions, probably billions of dollars. I don't remember the numbers right now. And It just basically brought the system crashing down out there. But as far as I remember, and as far as I can tell, the things Enron did out in California were perfectly legal. They just worked within the system out there. And the regulators had no idea that the system they set up would allow Enron to do the things they did. So. So how does that relate back here to Texas? Well, as I said, Texas is in the last throes of the competitive market here. And you may have listened last week when I talked about the Texas PC thumbing its nose at Governor Abbott because it Governor Abbott had sent a letter to the PC Commissioner saying move forward, in in restructuring the Texas electricity market, but they didn't do anything. The week, they're at their meeting the week after that letter. And so it's going why did they do that? Why they're thumbing their nose? Well, it turns out, they were just pausing a little bit, because this past week, the PC came out and passed the restructuring. Now what happened this time was essentially the PC thumbed its nose at the Texas Senate, because prior to the even the governor's letter, the Texas Senate, or at least the members of Business and Commerce Committee, who oversees the PUC at the Texas Senate, and sent a letter to the PC saying, Whoa, hold on people. You guys are moving too fast. What and what you're talking about doing isn't what we intended for you to be doing when we passed this legislation back in 2021. And so they went from thumbing their nose at the governor, it turned out they didn't quite do that. It just kind of looked like it on the outside to specifically thumbing their nose at the Texas Senate. And in particular, I think it lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, because it's the piece, the Texas Business and Commerce Committee has made themselves clear. But so as lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, that he thinks what the PCs doing should turn in another direction. And he's got some options out there as well. I don't think what he wants to do is necessarily good. But nonetheless, you have this dynamic that the PUC is telling the Senate and the leader of the Senate, the lieutenant governor, that we're going to do whatever we think now, they did stop in the process after adopting this model moving forward and say, Look, we're gonna pause during the legislative session. But it really looks like that may not do much good. I mean, we'll see what happens. But obviously, the governor is a Texas is telling them to move forward with this model. The House of Representatives is full of nothing but corporate cronies just released the leadership over there. And all they didn't want to do is spin, send billions of dollars to, to big corporations, including generators, and gas companies and things like that. They've been really bad that it's been awful what they've done since, well, for a long time, in some ways, but particularly since we've got a new speaker, and particularly since we've seen all the blowback from the winter storm URI back in 2021. So it looks like the PC may be moving forward with this plan, Despite the objections of the Texas Senate, we'll have to see how that plays out over session. The one thing that might slow that down a little bit, is that the sunset I mean, the sunset commission is reviewing right now the Texas Public Utility Commission, which means the legislature has to pass a bill to renew the PUC otherwise, it goes out of existence towards the end of this year. So that might be a leverage point that the Senate can do, they might not be able to force otherwise force the House to pass a bill that they like and Governor to sign it, but they could just kill a sunset bill, the PC goes away. And then where does that leave everybody? So who knows how that's gonna play out. But let's just assume for the moment that they move forward, the PUC on some plan like this? Well, essentially, what they are doing is making up a brand new electricity market that nobody's ever heard of before. Nobody's ever seen function before. They got a consultant who drew up plans for for about five different ways to create a new electricity market. And everybody's looking at this going, what do you what are you doing? Nobody's ever heard about this before. And guess what happens when you make up a new electricity market? First of all, it's not an electricity market, right? It's a false construct that pretends like it's going to be electricity market. And does that sound familiar to you? Well, it should because we just talked about that in California. And this is the exact same thing that the California tried to do. 20 Plus A few years ago. Now, I haven't looked closely enough at the structure of this plan come in to compare it to what California did. But that's not really the important thing. The important thing is they're both made up. And, and I guarantee you, it will let me let me read some, just a quick blurb from the Houston Chronicle because I think that'll help us understand a little bit more what's going on. This is from the from the Houston Chronicle. The PUC approved a series of guiding principles, and a broad blueprint for how it would like the market to work, and it directed ERCOT and PC staff to study and submit proposals for how best to implement the new market structure. We might say that the new quasi semi made up market structure. Some specific recommendations proposed Thursday, however, cause friction at the meeting. Most of those points were raised by Commissioner Jimmy Glatfelter. When he described what he would like to see added to the PCM proposal. The PCM proposal is what the PUC is thinking about adopting. He worried that if generators and their affiliated electric retail retailers such as NRG and reliant or VISTA and Tsu sold and bought performance credits. among themselves, they could hypothetically game the market and concentrate market share. Peter lake that's a chairman of the PUC said that that would be unlikely because those transactions would be centrally cleared through ERCOT. The New York Stock Exchange has market manipulation all the time, and it's still centrally cleared GLAAD filthy said the commissioners ultimately, task ERCOT staff to study whether implementing that type of ban would signify would have a negative impact on the market. So here's the point I'd like to make. So Lake said that manipulation would be unlikely because those transactions would be centrally cleared through ERCOT. Well, that's actually the real problem. There's nothing wrong with having a market where the market participants use some kind of central clearinghouse to clear their transactions. What what is wrong, though, is when the government sets up this quasi fake kind of market, and tells all the participants how they're going to act in this market, and where it's going to be cleared, and how all that it's going to work. Because I guarantee you, just like in California, the people who work in the Texas electricity market are smarter and brighter and better understand how markets work than the people who are going to be designing this market. Again, not that there's folks that there are folks that are caught and folks at the PC who are smart and bright. But ultimately, and a lot of them have business and industry experience in the business before coming over to be regulators. But ultimately, they don't have the day to day knowledge of how this thing works, and how it should a market should operate. They're really short on how markets should operate. So they're going to design something that doesn't work, right? The way markets really should work, right? And people in the marketplace, or the fake marketplace, generators and retailers, and those kinds of folks are going to figure out ways to manipulate it. I mean, that's my prediction. And so we might run into a scandal, like we had with Enron, 20 or so years ago, where businesses in Texas are doing what the laws allow them to do, but which the regulator's didn't anticipate, and somebody's gonna make a lot of money off of that. And then everybody's gonna complain about these companies making billions of dollars, and they're going to call it a scandal. And they're going to want to go after these companies and find them a whole lot for market manipulation, when really all they're doing is just using the market as it was designed by the regulators. So that's the problem we might be facing. That's why we might be facing another Enron scandal. But we can avoid all this by rather than having regulators design a brand new market, have them get their hands and their teeth, and whatever it is, they're sticking into the current market and forcing them to get them those out of the current market and stop them from being able to manipulate the market. For instance, just one example. Back during a thunderstorm Yuri, the price of electricity was $2,000 per megawatt hour. That's really high. But the PC commissioners, egged on by their staff, it wasn't just the commissioners does it the staff wanted to do it best. My understanding is they raised the price of electricity to $9,000 per megawatt hour, and broke, everybody raised our bills, put people out of business, put Texans or Texas consumers and billions of dollars of debt. Right now that's starting, that's costing us about 700 billion a year because of that price hike, because it's going to be paid off over many years. And why did they do that? Well, because they thought, well, the price isn't high enough. And we need electricity. So if we raise the price higher, more people will be producing electricity. And then that will in the blackouts. Well, that sounds like a brilliant theory, but there was a problem with it. With the freeze, there wasn't any more electricity to be found. There was nobody who could generate more electricity, it wasn't because the price wasn't high enough. And they were just holding back until the price went higher. It was because their plants were frozen, or they weren't able to get natural gas, or the wind wasn't blowing, or the sun wasn't shining. Those were the problems. It wasn't a problem with the market. It was a problem with the weather. And it was a problem with the interventions in the market. Also, that led to us having so much wind and solar in the state of Texas that caused a lot of the problems. It was also a problem with market regulators. He shut down electricity to to transmission stations and other places. They were transmitting natural gas to generators could use it, the vast majority of the problems that led to the blackout, not not just the cold weather, and shortages. But to the blackout that lasted for three days. That was all government intervention. The last thing we need here in Texas, is to see winter storm URI the intervention and the market manipulation that that took place before and up to n into winter storm Yuri the last thing we need to see that is on steroids with the PUC creating a new electricity market. But that looks like it's what they're going to do. Well, thank you very much for being with me today on this week's Liberty cafe. And I hope that you have a blessed week, and also hope that you run over to Texas scorecard, sponsored Liberty cafe and see what they're up to. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about the show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next timeTranscribed by https://otter.ai
Last week, the Texas PUC ignored Gov. Greg Abott’s admonition to move forward rapidly with their redesign of the Texas electricity market. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we explore why the PUC commissioners ignored their boss and what effect this might have on the reliability of the Texas grid and on Texas consumers. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text, as robots still have a lot to learn:Something very intriguing happened last week in Texas politics. Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter to his appointees at the Texas Public Utility Commission, encouraging them to move forward fast quickly on the redesign of the Texas electricity market. They've been working on this really since the legislature passed some bills back in 2021. About the whole market redesign in response to the problems with winter storm URI, when, as most of us know, we went without electricity for days here in Texas. But an interesting thing happened. The PC when it met last week, a few days after Governor Abbott's letter didn't do anything. In fact, they said they're going to be open to more input on how the market redesign process should go forward. Why did they ignore Governor Abbott? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. In more on this week's episode 111 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, this is Bill peacock. And I'm so blessed, as I am every week to have you come in and listen to the Liberty cafe. Well, you may not be coming in every week to listen to Liberty cafe, but I hope you are. And if you're not, maybe you can pick it up a little bit more. And I'm always trying to pick it up and make the Liberty Cafe something that you want to come listen to. And then of course, always grateful for the folks over at Texas scorecard. They're doing great work on they're working on the electricity market they're working on, you know, all the child abuse that's going on in Texas are working on the fiscal side of things, the budget, and a lot more than that. So go over to Texas scorecard.com, and see what they're doing and what you can do to continue the fight for liberty here in Texas. Well, like I said, it's really interesting, because the commissioners at the PUC are all appointed by Greg Abbott, they have to be confirmed by the Texas legislature. But he appoints them, they're his employees more or less. And, you know, for instance, in the past, I know of a commissioner who voted did not vote the way on something that the governor at the time wanted that commissioner to vote on. And it was within a week or two that that Commissioner submitted his or her resignation. Right. It just works that way. Right? When the governor appoints you to something like that, the governor expects you to kind of follow along with what he wants to do, for the most part, particularly when you have a micromanaging governor, which Greg Abbott can be sometimes and then other times, he doesn't really pay much attention to what's going on underneath him. But when it comes to the Texas electricity market, he or his staff are paying a lot of attention. So he sends this letter to his people over at the Public Utility Commission, all of which he has appointed, and tells them essentially get move. And he says Time is of the essence, you've been doing this, for what what is a, you know, 18 months, he says it's an extensive stakeholder engagement process. And it's time to get moving forward time is of the essence as as he said. And then the PC comes to the hearing where they could do this, you know, they've got this plan that they put out, it was commissioned out to this company called E three. But trust me the recommendations in this report, were all kind of guided and directed by the commissioners at the Public Utility Commission. And so they had about five different options about a path forward. And they seem to be liking one of those options. Back when they hold held public hearings on this last year. Avid seemed to come out with a different option that he liked, but in any direction. In any case, he said move forward. And so they had this plan before them they could have voted to move forward on one of the options and tell people to get started on it. But they didn't do it. Why would they ignore their boss like that? Well, it turns out that Greg Abbott isn't the only boss that the Public Utility Commission has, in fact, another boss they have it's kind of an indirect thing, but it's an important relationship is The Texas legislature, the Texas Legislature oversees, through in the Senate, the Senate Business and Commerce Committee, and the house the House State Affairs Committee, oversees the PUC. The Texas Legislature provides funding to the PUC. The Texas legislature doesn't appropriate money, the PUC, they don't get any money. And so when you oversee an organization like the PUC is a government agency like the PUC, when you have the purse strings in your hands, like the PUC, for the PUC, like the legislature does, then, you know, sometimes you got to pay attention to the legislature, in addition, or all the time really, in addition to the guy who puts you on the commission. And so what had happened. So the PUC had held this big public hearing, and says, Oh, this is a great plan. We like it. We're going to examine this and move forward quickly. That was towards the end of last year. And then the Texas legislature actually the Texas because Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee, held a public hearing where they heard testimony from both the PUC and experts and industry experts and the public as well, including me, I was down there and got my three minutes of fame on all that. And a lot of people including me saying, wait a minute, this is a big problem. The manufacturers in Texas said it was a big problem, the ERCOT Market Monitor and this is an economics firm Potomac economics out of DC. He has been hired by the state of Texas to ensure the competitive nature of the Texas electricity market. The legislators kind of messed with that in a lot of ways. But still, anyway, the economist who works for Potomac economics, said, This PUC plan was not a good deal. And so one of the big problems that people brought up was that it was going to cost a lot of money. And it was going to disrupt market competition. And in my case, and a couple of others said that it wasn't going to do anything to deal with one of the main reliability problems in Texas, which was, which is renewable energy under the any of the PUC has options that they have in their plan. Over the next four years, renewables are going to make up 99% of all new generations. So the Senate got an earful from all these people, and ask a lot of questions about whether any of these plans were the right thing to do going forward. And so maybe a week or two after that hearing. The the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee sent a letter to the PUC saying, Whoa, hold on. Wait a minute. We want to have some input into this, because the PUC had told everybody that their plan was to adopt one of these plans within within either the end of last year or the first part of this year. So they could move forward because they had their direction from the Texas legislature back in 2021. And it was time to get moving. So that was their pathway that they had laid out for everybody. But the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee said, Whoa, wait a minute, slow down. We want to have some more input into this. Now, of course, that committee, I think it's nine members. It's only nine members of the 181 members of the Texas Legislature, but they've got some pretty significant input into what goes on when it comes to the PUC. And so what you had going on here was a few members of the Texas Senate versus the PUC and Governor Greg Abbott about whether they should move forward. But there's some other things that were going on in the background. You also had Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who has come out and said that he favors an approach that actually puts new generation in the ground. This is a plan that he hasn't come out and doors specifically the Warren Buffett plan, but it's basically the Warren Buffett plan he's been talking about which Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway proposed right? Pretty soon after winter storm Yuri, that if the Texas Texas, Texas consumers, you and me would pay him $8 billion or so that he would come in and build a bunch of new natural gas fired plants in Texas. And then if we needed electricity, they wouldn't run most of the time. But if we needed electricity, then they turn on and we'd have electricity. Now that sounds kind of good. Maybe it least compared to the You see plans that actually guarantees that new generation is going to go into the ground. But it doesn't fix the problems with the current market, which are really, the problems with the current Texas electricity market are too much government intervention into the marketplace. And so Berkshire Hathaway's plan, which some form of which Dan, Patrick seems to like, isn't going to solve the problem because it's more government intervention. So what we need is less government intervention, we need less renewable energy, we need less subsidies for renewable energy. If we can't, and we can't shut off the federal government spigot for renewable energy subsidies, which just gone on steroids under the inflation Reduction Act by President Biden and Congress. We can't turn that off. But we can penalize the producers, generators in Texas who take that money and harm the reliability of the Texas market. So we can do a lot of things to deal with this. But nonetheless, whether it's a good plan or not, I think Lieutenant Governor Patrick was also in the works this past week or two, trying to slow down what was going on with the PUC under the direction of Governor Abbott to move forward. And then the the final piece of all this, which is really fascinating for me, politics, I love this stuff, is that the Public Utility Commission is under Sunset Review this session. And which is really interesting, because what that means is that the statute that authorizes the existence of the Public Utility Commission will expire at the end of I think it will expire. I think it expires in probably the end of 2024. Right before the legislature comes back and in 2025. Or maybe it's actually right at the end of the after session September 1 of this year. I'd have to go back and look but anyway, it goes away. And with that the PC would go away, unless the Texas legislature passes a sunset bill on the PC, which renews the PUC. So all of a sudden the PC has a lot at stake. It's not just what the Business and Commerce Committee is saying or maybe even what the Senate Finance Committee is saying. Because the House of Representatives these days tends to like all this corporate welfare, big dollars going into renewable generators and existing generators and all these kinds of things. There is really bad over in the house when it comes to corporate cronyism. It's just bad. I can't say that. So despite all that, then you can have because it takes two thirds of the folks in the Senate to bring up any bill for debate was not quite two thirds anymore. 60% or so. What is it 18 or 19 votes in the 31. Member, Texas senate. So if you get 12 or 13, folks, depending on what the number is, you can block any bill from coming up for debate in the Texas Senate and that bill dies, including potentially the sunset bill for the Texas PUC. So, the PUC has a big stake this session and the Texas Legislature. So my guess is that despite Governor Abbott's admonition, encouragement for the PUC to hurry up, remember, Time is of essence, he told them. Instead, they paid a lot more attention to what the Texas legislature saying them saying to them, and they just put a halt on it. And they're going to take some time. My guess is they wait until the end of the legislative session for the legislature to renew them through the sunset process and any bills that might come out of the legislature to give them more direction on what the PUC should do in this market redesign. So that's what happened this past week. Again this kind of fascinating for me because how these machinations go on and and how the politicians do all this kind of stuff. Now, the sad thing in all this from from my perspective is that even though the PC has kind of been put on hold the options that the Texas legislature are considering Dan Patrick's plan over here, whatever it might come out of the Texas House are not really good ones for Texas consumers. So I'm with the one I do a lot of things but one thing I do is I work with the the Energy Alliance here in in Texas and put We look particularly at Texas. And we just put out a report this week that talks about the problems with the Texas electricity market. And, you know, the kind of the foundation of a report was that the PCs effort to redesign the market makes the market more expensive, but less reliable, right. So it'd be one thing, I mean, it wouldn't be good. But at least if they were spending a lot of money to make the market more reliable, you know, at least you can see the some benefit in that. And that's kind of what the Berkshire Hathaway plan does cost a lot of money. $8 billion. And I don't know how much money that cost per year. But this could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, over parent paying it off period, over 30 years or so. But you know, at least you have that going for it. But the PCs plan doesn't do that more expensive and less reliable. And you can see that basically in the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, 99% of all new generation is going to be renewable, which means it's not going to be there when we need it most. It's intermittent generation, instead of reliable, always on except for maintenance. And then when you have things like winter storm, Mary, which causes problems with everybody. So we can't survive as an energy market in Texas electricity grid in Texas, with all the new generation basically being renewable, it's going to make a bad situation worse, and that's kind of what our report puts it out there as but so but what's the alternative to that? Well, we have a bunch of recommendations is but the bottom line is that one of the key things that the PC is doing is they're saying we need a reliability standard here in Texas. Now, I don't want to get too far in the weeds for y'all here today. But the beauty of the Texas electricity market, which was introduced the competitive Texas renewable energy, sorry, competitive Texas electricity market, which was passed in Law by the Texas Legislature and in 1999, and went into partial effect, phased in in 2001. And then full effect in 2007. The beauty of all that was, there was no reliability standard, there was no PC telling generators, how much to build, and how much it was going to cost us and said, instead, generators came to Texas and built generation plants. And if they could sell their electricity to consumers, and that would be you know, us as individuals, and then businesses, small businesses, and some of these big huge manufacturers like Texas Instruments, and Exxon Mobil and those kind of things, if they could sell their electricity to profit, they made a profit. If they couldn't sell it at a profit, they lost money. And if they kept doing that for long enough time, they went broke. And that happened in the marketplace. And that was the beauty of the market. But now what the PC wants to do, and they say it's required in the legislation that the Texas Legislature passed, but it's not, there's some stuff about a reliability standard in there, but it's not mandated at all. Now, they want to come in and say, Okay, we're going to say we need this much electricity. And, which means if we don't have that much electricity, they're going to be mandating people to build stuff. And if you do that, you got to start mandating prices. So you got to start telling people how much money they're gonna make. At that point in time, it all falls apart. It's just like saying, you know, going into the computer industry, and the US government, and you know, who knows, we might not be that far away from this, but telling the US government, or the US government telling the computer industry, we need this many computers, and the industry says, Well, no, we don't. And they say, Well, yes, we do. And so here, here it is, and then you can sell it, you have to sell it for this price to make your money. And by the way, we're not gonna let anybody else sell computers, except for you guys who we tell you to build to build the stuff. Well, that's kind of what would be going on here in the Texas electricity market. So the first thing we say is just don't put a reliability standard in the place. Let the generators and the consumers the buyers and sellers determine how much electricity we need, much more efficient, much more cost effective. We need to scrap the PCs market redesign project that just needs to go away. And then we need to get rid of chapter 312 and 313. Property tax abatements Which tradition I mean the majority of the projects under those plans. Basically, a business comes into a school district or a county and says we want to build a generating plant here or manufacturing plant, if you'll cut and we'll come if you'll cut our property taxes in half for 10 years, well, most of those are going to renewables. So 313 went away. That's for school districts last time, we need to make sure the legislature doesn't renew that although David feeling speaker, the House says he wants to at least get rid of that we also really ought to get rid of chapter 312. And not let renewables use those things. And then finally, we need to force renewable generators to pay us back for all the harm that they are doing. To the Texas market, the reliability problems, it costs billions of dollars a year to overcome the damage being done by renewable energy. We've calculated that at the Energy Alliance, and we're estimating about $8 billion a year, there's a electricity tax of about $8 billion a year on Texas consumers some of that we pay in our income tax bill through the federal government, some of it we pay through property taxes, and then some of it we just pay through the cost of electricity, and about $6 billion a year that is under the control the Texas Legislature. So if they would force renewable generators to pay us back some portion of that money, and a portion, a lot of those costs out to renewable generators and to other generators. If they're causing some problems, and some of them are, then that's the path forward all this. So I hope I haven't gotten too far down in the weeds on this. But really, when it comes to what we need to do, to fix the Texas electric grid, the Texas electricity market, is to get government out of it. There's no reason for the government to run, much less even regulate for the most part the Texas electricity market, and let buyers and sellers conduct business without all this government intervention. Mainly, the bottom line is we need to let the Texas electricity market work. Well, thank you for coming and joining me today on the Liberty cafe. And thanks once again to our sponsors, Texas scorecard. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about the show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next time.Transcribed by Otter.ai.
The Texas Comptroller recently announced that the Texas Legislature has an unprecedented $32 billion budget surplus of your tax dollars. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we take a look at whether they are going to spend your money or give it back to you in the form of property tax cuts. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any typos, as robots still have a lot to learn.:Well as happens every two years, specifically, every odd numbered year, about this time of year, the first Tuesday after the second Monday of the new year in January, the Texas legislature comes into session. And one of the major things that the Texas Legislature has to do every two years when they come into session is pass a budget. Another way of looking at that, is they have to spend your money. And trust me, it's not that they they don't do it because they have to. They do it because they want to. As we look at the Texas Comptroller Glenn Hagos announcement that just came out a couple of days ago. They actually have just this this year alone, this biennium alone, 32 extra billion dollars sitting around. And by the time the session is done, they're looking forward into the next two year period biennium period, they're going to have another about about another 10 or $11 billion that they can spend. So a total of about $43 billion dollars extra, probably over and above what they've been spending this past this past two years. So what are they going to do with it? Well, that's what we're going to talk about this week, on episode 110 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, my name is Bill peacock. And I am the host of the Liberty cafe. I'm always grateful to have you here on the Liberty cafe with me joining me in this fight against depression, and joining. But all of us joining the folks at Texas scorecard because we're here in this battle with them. They're the sponsor of the Liberty Cafe, and they're doing wonderful work here to fight for your liberty, and your freedom and against oppression here in Texas. So let's look at the Texas budget. Let's look at tax cuts. Let's look at property taxes, all those kinds of things. So I love datum. I'm kind of a nerd that way, but I love data. And so over the last week or two, about about 10 days, there has just been a ton of data coming out all of it from the comptroller's office, which I think has been, which is pretty important. The first thing that came out was the property tax numbers. The levy the property tax levy numbers from the Texas comptroller's office, what they do is at the end of each year, they levy the, the amount or they calculate the levy, that we're supposed to be paying in our property taxes, which is pretty simple. They know how much value property values in a certain jurisdiction, whether it's a county or a city or school district. And they get reported to them for the most part, not all entities, districts or cities or counties cooperate. But they get the property tax rate reported to the comptroller's office. So they just apply the rate to the to the value of the property and come up with a pretty close estimate of how much we're all paying for property taxes each year. And they break it down into special purpose districts, school districts, cities and counties. And you can add it up and see how much property taxes has grown over the years. There's some some anomalies with the data. But I think it's pretty good data. And so that's just out and I don't have the numbers all calculated quite yet. But I'm pretty sure that I can tell you at the end of that when I do is that this property tax cut that we all voted on back in May, I guess it was April, whenever the primaries were that we're supposed to give property taxes from the legislature because at least homeowners because they expanded our property or homeowners exemptions. We didn't get property tax cuts. We we might have gotten a little relief but not much property taxes have all gone up this year. So that's number one that these are the bills that we're paying right now. They were due January first they're overdue by the end of January. So that was the first set of data and that's that's pretty good. We'll talk maybe a little bit about that. The second set of data that came from the comptroller's office is some data on the amount of chapter 313 property tax abatements applications that had been processed by the comptroller's office. So basically chapter 313. Property tax abatements are what a big big In this and usually very big business and most often a renewable energy generator, either wind or these days more likely to be solar generator, goes to some school district and says, Hey, we want to build a wind turbine or we want to build a wind farm or a solar farm in your school district, or it could be some kind of manufacturing process as well. And if you'll give us a property tax base payment, which will essentially cut our taxes in half over the next 10 years will come build us here and your school district will get a lot more money. And don't worry about the people who have to live near these wind turbines or solar farms. All you need to focus on is you getting more money so we can build our wind farm or solar farm. And so but fortunately, the legislature last session allowed that program to expire and everybody just went crazy. There were more applications according to the data on the Comptroller's website, filed for Chapter 313 tax abatements Since June 1 of last year when everybody knew that the program was going away, more more filed during that year and a half period until the program expired a few days ago, then there had been going all the way back to 2014. Everybody, and their stockholders wanted to get a piece of your property tax dollars, because what happens, of course is, you know, they get the tax cuts, you get to continue to pay property taxes and make up for what they're not paying. So that data was up there probably won't talk much about this today. But it's really cool. And then, most recently, just yesterday, Tuesday, the Texas Comptroller came out and told the Texas Legislature how much money they're going to be able to have your money, they're going to be able to spend over the next two years on state and government. Right. And it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. He said that if you know if the legislature doesn't spend any more in the current biennium, the current two year budget period, and they could because that doesn't end until September 1 of this year, August 31. But if they don't spend any more of this period, they will but but, and just go next year, they'll have $188 billion to spend over the next two years. And this is just state tax and, and tax related revenue fees and all those kinds of things. This doesn't include some other money that the state can get their hands on, and it doesn't include it all federal money. So this is $94 billion a year for the next two years, they're going to be able to spend, if you look at the how much extra money that is over what they have spent in this current two year period, that adds up to about $43 billion surplus. So the question becomes, and this is what everybody's talking about, and we're going to talk a lot about it today. Is what do you do with this 43 billion extra dollars? Well, if you're a politician in Texas, most likely you want to spend it. If you're a politician in Texas, at local government, or in schools, trustees, mayors, city council, county commissioners, those kinds of things, you're gonna want the legislature to give it to you. Right? You're gonna want to get your hands on this money. But what if you're a taxpayer like me? I would just assume them not spend any more money. I think government's too big already. I want them to stop spending my money and give the extra back to me. Um, I'd love if government cut spending right now, that'd be great. But how about let's just go with this no new growth, that they don't spend any more money next year. And the year after that than they did this year. That's a big start. And that's what we could do with this $44 billion surplus. That's the concept if they don't spend any more next year than they do this year, or any more of the year after that than they do this year. And they have 44 43 billion extra dollars of our dollars just lying around that they could give back to us. And that's a lot of money, but they don't really want to do that. Greg Abbott went back when this surplus was looking at $27 billion a few months ago, he said he wanted to give half of the money back to taxpayer so we're looking Did about 13 or $14 billion. So I don't think that's enough. But you gotta give Abbott credit for saying that. And let's hope he continues to push for that and and push for more. But Dan Patrick, was way, way below that number, he first came out with about $4 billion. And then he dropped that off to about well, two and a half billion dollars for homeowners, and then we'll look also to getting some more to businesses. But, you know, 4 billion seems like top for him. And then our speaker, the house Dade feeling has indicated that he's interested in spending that money if not most of that money, if not all that money on more government, because he's pointed out man, there's a lot of stuff the infrastructure, and have you seen how the price of government is going up these days, we got to spend that money because inflation is making government more expensive? Well, I think Speaker feelin has forgotten, or just ignored the fact that inflation is also driving up our costs. And wouldn't it be nice to the Texas Legislature to give us our money back. So we can meet these increasing costs, because the truth of the matter is, is if government's already too big, and it is, then if they spend the same amount of money next time as they did this time, and they have to deal with inflation? Well, that's okay. Because they might have to cut a few services here, even though it's the same amount of money because of inflation. But that's okay. Because government is already too big. For one of the things they could cut is all this money they're giving to renewable energy companies and other businesses, corporate welfare, billions of dollars of that in there, but also a lot of the things that they do that they shouldn't be doing. So that's the debate going on up in Austin, are here in Austin, or near here in Austin, we're out in the Texas hill country these days. So how are we going to get this money back to Texas taxpayers? Well, the there's two different ways really, you can do it that are pretty simple. We don't have an income tax here in Texas for for individuals, businesses have a component of income tax, but individuals don't. So they can't just give us tax refunds that way. So there's really two different ways. One is they can cut sales taxes. And that's a perfectly legitimate and it's actually the easiest way to do it, you just cut sales taxes instead, right now, the state, you know, most of us pay eight and a quarter percent sales tax, when we go to buy something at the store, the state gets 6.25% of that. And so they could just cut that rate, they could I haven't done the numbers, they could cut it down to five and a quarter percent, something like that. So that the money that the state would be getting from that drops. And let's just say, you know, over the next two years, they have 43 billion extra dollars, it's a simple math problem, the legislature tells the Comptroller to drop the tax rate to an amount that would reduce our sales taxes over the next two years, by $43 billion. And then they just use a surplus to take to fill in the gap. So government doesn't grow at all. Matter of fact, taxes, state taxes drop way down, the amount of money going into government stays level. And we're in really good shape. Now, I That's the easiest, simple way. And I would normally favor that, except for the problem of property taxes, property taxes are just going out of control. Whereas at least the sales tax stays at the same rate. Schools and counties and cities and special purpose districts are constantly raising the not just the revenue, but the rates on that. And that, you know, it's not just the growing economy, they raise the rates so they can get more money, or they lower the rates, but not as much as the property value. So they're constantly assessing in getting those rates up. So I think right now, eliminating, reducing property taxes is more important than having, you know, a one time lowering of the sales tax, or maybe you could make it permanent as well. So property taxes. So how do we do that? Well, I'm working with Don Hofheinz at the Hofheinz Liberty Foundation. And if you followed him during his gubernatorial campaign in his time in the Texas Senate property taxes was something that is very important to him, reducing those or eliminating them entirely. And so we're working together at the Hofheinz Liberty foundation to come up with The plan for eliminating not all the property taxes at this point in time because it's a lot of money. For instance, if you look at the total levy based on this new fancy data from the comptroller's office this year, they're estimating that is $81 billion in property taxes that Texans paid this this year, they're paying right now paid for the year tax year 2022. But if you get it down to school property taxes, and even a little bit lower than that, to school maintenance and operation, property taxes, the number becomes more manageable. school property taxes overall are about $44 billion this year. But if you that's two parts, its maintenance operations, just what they paid to operate the schools and pay the teachers and the janitors and, you know, operate to pay your electric bills and those kinds of things. And then another part of it is about 20% of it, is what's called the INS interest in sinking fun. And that's what they use to pay off debt. So it's a little more challenging, you can do it, but it's a lot more challenging to to pay off deal with the ins, the sinking fun part to pay off the debt. So what we're proposing is to leave all this, all that alone right now and just go after the the money that is in there for the maintenance and operations. And that brings us that gets us to about $36 billion or so. So that's a manageable number that we can deal with. Now, it's it's interesting, because we're actually budget surplus, this go around is actually about $43 billion, like I mentioned already, but it's not like we could get rid of the property tax just overnight. I mean, we could actually get rid of it for one year. And nobody would pay property taxes to school districts imminent taxes to school districts, for the next year. But then this is not a recurring surplus, I estimate about 33, or 4 billion of that is a one time deal. Because of you know, we had the COVID slowdown. And then we had the COVID rebound. And then we had a bunch of federal funds that came into play and those kinds of things. So that's why we have this huge $32 billion surplus right now, it's not going to be like that in the future. So rather than do that, we can use that current surplus, and we along with a lot of other people are suggesting that the surplus, the 100% of his current surplus, be used to buy down property taxes, and then going forward, we essentially limit the growth of government by a certain percent. And then revenue is going to continue to grow because the economy grows. And then we use the Delta in between the restrain the growth in spending, and the economic growth and use that the difference in between there to further buy down property taxes. And this is the kind of strange thing, the magic formula, the magic way to get rid of property taxes is for your elected officials, politicians in the state to exercise fiscal discipline. Now I know that's kind of a radical concept. For a lot of for liberals for certainly, but even for a lot of all politicians, a lot of Republicans even, it's just hard, they get money, they want to spin it because everybody's coming to Austin and wanting money from them. And even sometimes Republicans are going up, they're asking for money. And so it makes it really hard for them. And then some of them don't really care. They want to spend your money anyway. And they're just looking for ways to try and make sure that you don't know it. Like I'm engaged right now, some conversations with folks I've worked with for a long time. All smart, knowledgeable, people been doing this for a long time, just like I have. And we're having a bit of a challenge of working through all these numbers. Because they make it so complicated. And again, they make it complicated, because it's easier to hide how much of your money they're spending. But we're gonna get to the bottom of this and our paper from the Hofheinz foundation that's gonna come out probably next week is going to show that we can do this and do it well. Depending on what the spending growth is, if we just say zero spending growth, we can probably eliminate the property tax and about the school MnO property tax in about five years, if we let them grow the government by 2% annually, which I'd prefer not to but it's better than what they've been doing lately. That we could still get rid of the MnO property tax in about nine years, just think about that. Without any new taxes being implemented, if they just exercise fiscal restraint, we can totally eliminate our school m&r property taxes. That would be a tax saving this year of or are coordinated current rates, as I already mentioned to you have about $36 billion or $36 billion tax cut when it comes to school property taxes. And of course, school property taxes are going up. So in in, in a few years, basically, we're having a situation where property taxes, school property taxes can either go to zero, or they're going to be pushing up to close to $60 billion. That's kind of the that's kind of the the trade off that we're looking at here. So what do we do about this? Well, go talk to your legislatures, legislators, write them, call them, come to Austin, go talk to them testify committee hearings, because it can be done. And it can be done easily in the sense that it's really simple. Spend less money or you don't have to spend less money, just don't spend don't allow spending to grow as fast as it has been keep it level or almost level and our school, maintenance and operation taxes can go away. And as little as five years. All right. Well, thank you very much for being with me today on the Liberty cafe. It's great to have you with me, as it always is. And I just think it's worth us thinking about this this simplicity of how things can really go if we take all the complexity out to the government and unbelievers and liberals try and throw at us and just look at the simplicity of how simply and how easily things can happen. And good things can happen. If we just work hard and pray to God to make them happen. His will be done. And also thanks to our good friends at Texas scorecard for sponsoring the Liberty cafe. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen to see you next time.Transcribed by Otter.ai
According to the left, conservatives are the main threat to democracy and the American way of life. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we take a look at the historical ignorance and outright hated of liberty that is driving the progressives’ claims. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors is the text, as robots till have a lot to learn:It seems like every time I browse through the mainstream media, I found out that I threat to democracy Well, okay. The progressive never attacked me by name or not too often anyway, but they do attack a lot of the foundations and institutions that I believe are important to liberty. On this week's episode 109 At Liberty Cafe will talk about the historical ignorance and the outright hatred of liberty that drives the left's claims that democracy is under assault. Hi, this bill Peacock, and I'm the host of the Liberty cafe. It's a blessing to have you here with me today. I hope you've been here with me for a while. But if you're brand new welcome, and I hope you'll be with me for a while moving forward. And also hope that you'll run over to Texas scorecard, a great group of folks over there fighting for liberty, and they're the sponsor of the Liberty cafe. So let's let's look more closely, digging a little deeper on all these alleged threats to democracy we're hearing about all the time. What got me thinking about this discussing this topic on the Liberty cafe was an article I ran across on some online rag named balls and strikes. Now I've no idea why they came up with that name, but I'm assuming that it's based on the old phrase about baseball, umpires, I call them like I see them. The idea being that whether a pitch is a ball or a strike is black and white. And the folks at balls and strikes will call politics just like the umpires do. balls and strikes. Well, if you've watched a baseball game of light with with the head, the strike zone right there on the TV, you know that what is a ball on a strike is often anything but black and white pitches that was completely across the plate, or fairly regularly called balls and pitches. two or even three inches outside the strike zone sometimes send batters back to the dugouts, just shaking their heads. And these calls often actually take place in very critical situations and again. Now, it's not that I don't believe that there is such a thing. There's such a thing as black and white in this world. Some things are right, and others are wrong. Some are good, and others are bad. The thing is that most progressives have no standard by which to judge what is black and white. Not Not only do they reject God's word, which is the only standard we can really use to judge these things. But they often deny there is any standard by which we can judge anything well, except, of course, their own beliefs. That's why I ran it when I ran across this article and black and balls and strikes, and it's titled The Supreme Court is going out of its way to remain unaccountable. I was quite skeptical of their take on this, even though I'm some in some ways sympathetic with the title. So don't get me wrong, though. I'm grateful for some of the recent Supreme Court rulings on abortions, gun rights, etc. I'm not the biggest fan of the court. I haven't done a comprehensive study of all its all of its decisions. But my guess is that unbalanced, the Supreme Court has done this country more harm than it has good. For instance, in a lot of very expensive reading of the Constitution is Necessary and Proper Clause which has allowed for a very expansive government, much more so than I think the founders expected. Then it caved in the 1930s to the threat of FDR, the threats of FDR and allowed his new deal to go forward through an expansive reading of the Constitution, its commerce clause, same kind of thing they'd done more than 100 years earlier, with the Necessary and Proper Clause. And then the court declared in this the Civil Rights Act of 1964 constitutional even though it was almost identical to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, that a previous Supreme Court had overturned as unconstitutional. And of course, in recent years, we've seen how the court has cleared the way for the murder of millions of American children, the destruction of American marriages and the corruption of American elections. So you may or may not agree with me on the court, but I'm pretty sure you'll agree with me The tape by James Lorac, the author of the article on balls and strikes, in the in his article about the Supreme Court make no sense at all. But before we get to his article, I think it might be worth listening to some other liberals out there spouting very similar anti democracy, malarkey. I've got four clips that I pulled up off the internet. And most off cable news, the one of them is from Congress. So let's roll with those. Now. We start off with a clip here from Tucker Carlson, followed by a CNN host complaining about his anti democratic be us. Why is it disloyal to side with Russia? But loyal to side with Ukraine? They're both foreign countries that don't care anything about the United States. Kind of strange, easy answer there one's a democracy, the others a brutal autocracy. The real question here may be why is Rupert Murdoch allowing this anti democratic BS on the air there? I really don't have a lot to say about what the CNN anchor said here. The only thing I would say is that anyone who thinks that Ukraine, the Ukraine has some idealized or bastion of functioning democracy can't really be taken seriously. So let's move on to an another clip this time from CNBC. Robert, it's great to see I want to read a little bit from your piece. It's titled The Arizona Republican Party's anti democracy experiment. In it Robert writes, there is more at stake than the health of the Republican Party when its core activist as well as a growing number of officials. And those campaigning for governmental positions openly espouse hostility not just to democratic principles, but increasingly to the word democracy itself. So this piece was about a nomination of Republicans. In Arizona, there's a primary like, people like Carrie Lake. But as we know, elections in Arizona's Maricopa County have been a mess, just this year, back in 2020, as well, but apparently when Republicans complain about this, even though the elections in Arizona were being run by Republicans were According to CNBC, at least we are guilty of espousing hostility towards democracy itself. Now let's move on to a clip from the United States government. This one has representative Jamie Raskin, and I'm not sure where he's from, but I'm sure he's what we might call a northeast liberal. He looks like a northeast liberal anyway. And he is speaking in his role as chairman during a hearing of the US House Oversight Committee on civil rights and civil liberties. Here's what he had to say. In prior hearings over the last three years long before violent insurrectionists bearing Confederate battle flags, overran the Capitol on January 6 2021. We found that violent white supremacy and its partner anti democratic extremism today constitute the most serious domestic terror threat facing our people. This is actually pretty disturbing. Here we have a high ranking member of the United States Congress branding is anti democratic extremists, those of us who don't like what the FBI has been doing lately, with Russia gate and the Hunter Biden laptop, for instance. We don't like what's been going on with our elections, we just want elections that are run under the laws set forth in the Constitution, and by the state legislatures, not by a bunch of judges and bureaucrats. Or maybe it's just those who decided to vote for Trump, Donald Trump. And then he lumps us in, along with our partners, the violent white supremacist, as the most serious domestic terror threat facing our country. This would be laughable if it weren't so serious, and because of the power that these folks have and what they could do to us if they continue to pursue this path. Finally, let's listen to one more clip. This was from MSNBC, where we hear from Harvard Law Professor Steven Levitsky, what would you say are the main anti democratic elements in our Constitution? Well, I will start as you as you mentioned, with the Senate the fact that each state no matter what the population has equal representation in the Senate is extraordinarily undemocratic. We're the least Democratic Senate and the Democrat in the democratic world outside of Argentina and Brazil. The electoral college is obviously profoundly undemocratic. Now we actually get to the core of what the progressive liberals are complaining about they they're making up all this stuff all the time to blame us as extremist and white supremacist and, you know, threats to democracy and all these kinds of things. But what they really don't like, is the US Constitution. And the reason they don't like the US Constitution is because they don't like anything in the Constitution that prevents a majority of progressive voters from telling the rest of us conservative Christians from how to live our lives, or from using their majority in Congress, or in the state legislature and City Hall, to take the money away from us and use it for their pet projects, through taxes, or they want to use their majority. And they can't use a majority, sometimes because of the Constitution. Because they want to take away our ability to speak freely, or they want to find us or even sometimes put us in jail when we disagree with them. So it's really kind of funny, though, how this actually works out. Because we see it's not really about democracy. Because when progressives are not in the majority, they're not complaining about the lack of democracy. They actually complain about the outcomes of democratic elections that results in the election of conservative officials and conservative policies. So I ran across an article in the Texas Tribune recently. If you don't know the Texas Tribune, is online progressive newspaper, if you will, right here in Austin, Texas, or I'm not in Austin anymore. But I used to be in Austin, I'm still close to it. But anyway, that's what it is. And they cover things from a very left wing progressive perspective. So let me just read a little bit from the tribune for you about these articles elections on midlane. When Progressive Era advocates pushed for municipal elections to be nonpartisan, they sought to remove party politics from local government. More than a century later, party politics appear to have seeped back in to down ballot races, injecting political ideology into Municipal Affairs in places like Odessa, an oil town in west West Texas. So here we see this discussion going on, about the elections out in Odessa. Now we don't know what the exact problem is, except we see that political ideology and partisan politics seem to be the problem. Now we can guess what those might actually be. And we'll find out just about in just a minute. But it turns out that the voters in Midland, through democratic elections have elected a solid conservative majority to the city council, including the mayor. I think it's four to one conservatives over liberals. And then this newly democratic elected majority fired to liberal city employees. So so that's what happens. That's what they're not happy about. They're not unhappy about democracy anymore. Matter of fact, I mean, about attacks on democracy. They don't like democracy in this case. And here's how the the tribune kind of talks about it and makes their case. During a town meeting this week, the Republican back majority on Odessa's nonpartisan city council, I guess we could say. Formerly nonpartisan, according to the tribune voted as a block to terminate to city employees, the city manager and city attorney without clear cause. The vote came just weeks after three new city council members were sworn into office. And before these new members had spent significant time working with the employees, they let go. mayor, Mayor Javier Hoeven and four council members, all of whom have been supported by ector County Republican Party voted to fire the two employees, city manager, Michael Marijo mereo and city attorney Natasha Brooks. So notice how the tribune is not cheering the outcome of the democratic elections in Midland. In fact, it's just the opposite. Democracy is just fine when progressives are winning, but when Christians and or conservatives when the process has spiraled downward in the party politics and political ideology, which according to the trivium are never present, of course, when progressive wins. Alright, so this finally brings us back to the article in black and white about the US Supreme Court. I won't read the whole article, but here is the author's primary complaint. He writes, The Supreme Court has always been one of America's least democratic institutions, both in terms of who's on it. Nine unelected lawyers, mostly from the country's most elite law schools and how it operates. So here we have, again, liberals complaining about the undemocratic nature of the US Constitution, whether it's the US Senate, the Electoral College, or the Supreme Court. The big problem with the Constitution, according these liberal progressives, is that it undermines democracy. So to that, how do I respond? What I say is, you guys are just now figuring this out. My high school government students understand this better apparently, then these liberals do, especially this Harvard law professor, who should know better. I mean, what happened back in 1787, during the Constitutional Convention, is that our founding fathers intentionally put anti democratic elements into the constitution. So the question is not whether they're in there, there have been in there for a long time, and everybody's known it for a long time. The question is, why did they do that? And why are people complaining about it today, when they really haven't been complaining about it? Before this. So they did it because they wanted to protect against what is happening now in our country, a majority of citizens using the institutions of democratic government to abuse or take away the inalienable rights given to us by our Creator, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is so straightforward. Any high school students should know about these things, college political science students should know about these things. Certainly a Harvard law professor should know about these things. But if they do know about it, they're just if the Liberals know about it, they're just totally ignoring it. And they're just going with this anti Democratic majority, because their will is being thrown sorted. And that's a good thing, because what what the founding fathers did was put this stuff in the Constitution was to protect against what they call at the time, the tyranny of the majority, or what you might also call mob rule, which is a lot of what we're seeing today. So here's how James Madison, in Federalist 47, explained the rationale for the elements of the Constitution that kept power from being accumulated in just one place. He wrote the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many. And whether hereditary, self appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. So what he's talking about here, is that power, constituted or put into a majority of the citizens hands, and just being able to wield it right and left, that is tyranny. The founding fathers were far from perfect. And many of them like Madison, I think successfully fought for a centralized government far stronger than has been good for our country. But to a man, they all even those who were not Christian, understood the fallen nature of mankind. And they also understood that without some elements in the Constitution that kept power from being accumulated either institutionally different branches of government, or geographically, well, for instance, in Washington, DC are temporarily, you know, being able to exercise all the power all at one time, America would be in trouble, kind of like we are today. So the founders were strongly influenced in this perspective, why they were concerned about tyranny of the majority under democracy, because they were strongly influenced by Augustine, the theologian from the four hundreds ad, and it was either directly for some of them and indirectly for others. So Augustine's work, for instance, on original sin, which was the idea that humans are all fallen and corrupt because of Adam and Eve's disobedience against God. Right. So that that was his concept, its understanding of the Bible, I think correctly, so about original sin. And see in his view was very popular with the leaders of the Protestant Reformation over in Europe, and England and Scotland in the 1500s or so, and it was those reformers were very influential and really laid the foundation nation for American independence, it wouldn't have happened. I don't think if it weren't for those men who and women who fought against the Catholic Church and reformed Christian doc brought reformed Christian doctrine out into the public eye. So if we're looking at Augustine, this is one way that he described the human nature. In his book, The City of God. He wrote, The Society of mortals spread abroad through the through the earth everywhere, and in the most diverse places, although bound together by a certain fellowship of our common nature, is yet for the most part divided against itself, and the strongest oppress the others, because all follow after their own interest and lust. While that is what is long for either suffices for none, or not for all because it is not the very thing for in almost all nations, the very voice of nature somehow proclaims that those who happen to be conquered, should choose rather to be subject to their conquerors than to be killed by all kinds of warlike destructions. He sees very nothing very good about human nature. And I think he's right. So the founders tried their best to protect Americans from this fallen human nature. But it appears that they really underestimated the problem. Because as America has moved into its post Christian phase, you might call today, we're looking more and more like the people that Paul wrote about in Romans chapter three. None is righteous, no, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God all of turned aside, together, they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive the venom of ASP is under their lips, their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood, in their pas are ruin and misery and the way of peace they have not known. I'd suggest that this is really what we are seeing. In those on the progressive left today, many of those, at least on the progressive left today, who are fighting to make the country more democratic. People whose mouths are full of curses and bitterness, whose feet are swift to shed blood. They're not interested, really in democracy, they are interested in power and wealth, and to be honest, eliminating those who stand in their ways. Now, as Christians, we can't gloat over that we're not one of them, we can oppose them, and do so from a righteous position and a righteous cause. But we can't gloat. Because it is only by the power of the gospel, and the Holy Spirit that we have turned, we have not turned out like them, but instead turn to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. So I think this also points us to the truth that we cannot change society through elections, or education, or think tanks. These are all important, no doubt. But the only way if we see humanity in this way that Augustine and the reformers in the Bible sees humanity. Really the only way the only changes that move us towards liberty is through changes in the hearts of 1000s, and ultimately millions of our fellow citizens. And the only way we can bring this about as Christians is by worshiping God, by praying to Him. And by bringing the whole council of his word to the public square. We need to be engaged in the public square speaking about Jesus but not just Jesus in a gospel sense. But Jesus is the King of the world, who's who's ruling over us and whose laws mean something when we're debating, having public debates over laws and public policy, and social justice and those type of things. The only thing I can say from that is just thanks be to God. That this is not only possible that it can happen, but that we can be sure one day it will come to pass. Well, thanks once again for being with me on this week's episode of liberty cafe. And thanks also again to our sponsor, Texas scorecard, please go over to Texas scorecard.com and see what they're doing in the fight for liberty today. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard dot Come be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on See you next timeTranscribed by https://otter.ai
Civil government’s assault on our liberties has taken over just about every aspect of our lives, including our economic activity. On today’s Liberty Cafe, we discuss the biblical foundation for taking most economic regulation away from politicians and bureaucrats and turning it over to families and civil courts. This podcast was transcribed by a robot called Otter.ai. Please forgive any errors in the text as robots still have a lot to learn:A number of Christians these days are learning more about the biblical concept of different spheres of government. So this begins with the fact that God has deigned for specific types of government. These four types are individual, government, family, government, church, government and civil government. To each of these, then God has delegated some of his authority. Largely separate, but also overlapping. There's a lot to be discussed there, but we're just gonna go on pass that right now. So one benefit of understanding this biblical delegation of authority to different spheres of government, is that it undermines the idea that many in this world have today and even a lot of conservatives, that civil government is the supreme governing authority in our world. On today's episode 108, in the Liberty cafe, we're going to look at, specifically at the the authority of family government. And to help us understand why civil government is not this overarching supreme governing authority, and specifically, why civil government has little to no biblical authority for most of the economic regulation it does today. Hi, this is Bill peacock. Welcome to the Liberty cafe. It's a blessing to have you here today, as it is each week that you come and listen to the Liberty cafe. Thank you for taking part in what we're doing here. When I say we, I mean, not just me, but the folks over at Texas scorecard, who sponsors the Liberty cafe. So I'm just grateful that we all together can be looking to God's word and looking how we can fight the fight for liberty and remove oppression from this world. So let's get back to this family government concept that I that I brought up at the beginning. So there have been there's really no doubt. I mean, we can all look around us and see that the civil government has basically taken over our lives, thinking that it is a supreme authority over everything. And because it regulates in some way, just about everything that we do. And as Christians and conservatives, we have to be realistic about this. If we're going to stop this, if we're going to limit this, if we're going to change this, we have to realize that this is not just a matter of the mind. Yes, we have to educate ourselves and others about what God has taught us in the various roles of government, our lives, but it's also a matter of the heart, we really need to submit ourselves to God submit to God ourselves, and take God's word out to others so that they will also submit to God and it's only through that processes education process, but also the submission process that we're going to find change in this world. So that's what I'm trying to do here on the Liberty cafe and specifically what we're doing today, with when it comes to the role of government regulation. So when we are doing this process, we need to kind of look both forward and backwards, we need to look back to the understanding that our Founding Fathers had about unalienable rights, and liberty. But we also need to look forward to the way that our economy will function in a world that is filled with people who understand and desire to submit to and obey God's world. And when we do this, we're going to see that God has delegated his authority for operating, and thus actually regulating the economy to families, and not to civil government. So where do I get off saying this? Well, let's, let's take a look at the role of the family. So we have, you know, just very briefly, the family has a head, and that's the father and husband. And then the wife also has authority in the family over the children just like the father does. But she also submits to the Father who is serving her, just like Christ served the church and serving the children as well as dying to himself for that. And when we do that, we see that there are different roles within the family for each of these. And that also determines not just right within the family, but the economic activity that each one of these folks undertakes. So for instance, I'm just going to give us a couple of examples here. So we're going to think about Jesus as a carpenter. So we don't know much about Jesus's life. Life before his ministry, we tend to know that he was a carpenter. But we know a lot about what carpenters might have been doing, particularly in Galilee were where he was from, remember, he was Jesus of Nazareth. So whereas we associate the Jews with Jerusalem, in Judea, Jesus wasn't from there. He was from Galilee, was very different economic setting down there, whereas Jerusalem and Judea were were dominated by government. And government spending and government public works projects like the building the temple, under Herod, it was much more free market, private economy up in Galilee. And so Jesus is a carpenter, who likely not just worked with wood, but also was stone as the people who are designated Carpenter, the Greek word for carpenter back then likely did, he would have gone outside his family, left his family and home and gone out and worked for other people out there. likely he would have been working for other men, because remember, this was not the government out there, largely but but other private activities. So he had been going out there other men who also were doing the same thing going out leaving their family and putting doing building projects and things like that for their business. And he would hire other men from other families like Jesus, who would do the same thing. And then they would all return home afterwards and bring generally not goods to into the home, but they would bring money back into the home, they would go out and earn their wages and bring money back in to the home. Now in the case of women, though, it looks a little bit different. And I'm just going to read a little bit from Proverbs 31 To help us understand what this looks like. This is Proverbs 3113 to 18. Describing this as a woman who is often described as the Proverbs woman. She seeks wool and flax and works with wheeling hands. She is like the ships of the merchants, she brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens. She considers a field and buys it. With the fruit of her hands, she plants a vineyard, she dresses herself with strength and makes her arm strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable, her lamp does not go out at night. As you can see, this married woman in her home while her husband is out working at some other workplace. She's very much engaged in the marketplace. She She but it's centered around the home. Now she obviously will go out to the land, but the land is probably around her homestead or close by, she'll should go into the town market. But it's always with the focus of bringing things back into the home. And she's unlike the husband is bringing money back in the home. She's generally bringing products back in the home produce and, and clothing and things like this. And then of course, the children in the situation, when they're early on in their lives, when they're not getting educated. They're going to be staying near the home with their mother and engaging in activities that are related to what the mother does, but the males, the boys and the girls, but as they grow and mature and become adults, then there they will to be going out into the world and and taking part in the world, in their own families and in the roles that males and females are designed by God to play. So if we, we see that the vast majority of economic activity in the world will at least in a in an in an economy unencumbered by government intervention through public works, projects and welfare and regulation takes place in and around the family. Now there may be certain types of business associations that undertake economic activity where groups of men get together groups of women get together. But even those, as we see are being carried out by the family. Or again, at least they would be in the vast majority of cases and aside society where the biblical view of family is valued. At this point, I hope that we see it's clear that the genesis of all businesses in the family because all workers will participate in it in a business come from family. So let me just look at one example here. Let's say a husband or a father As a successful blacksmith, he's so successful, in fact that he hires apprentice blacksmith from among the older children who live within the city gates or perhaps live with their families outside the city. So now, all of a sudden, he, this blacksmith has three young men working for him. They have, and then after a while, they have succeeded and finished their apprenticeship, but they still work for him. And now they have families, their own families, young families with a wife and a mother. At home, and so what happens is that the man leaves these, all these young men now leave the city gates, out of their families and come and go do their work, but then they come back home, and their wives are doing the same thing. So but in this situation, we see the beginnings of what we might think of modern corporations, but they're still all taking context of the in the context of the family. So now that we have this in place, this this idea that business is found grounded in the family, what obligations then do these businesses have to God, and we can place these obligations on both this this ideal model that we're talking about, and then the modern model of corporations, because they're a business and they're gonna have these obligations to God, the people in them are gonna have these obligations to God, no matter what structure their business takes. Well, let's look at a few passages from scripture that help inform us on this and how businesses might operate in an ethical way that brings glory to God. Let's go back to the law of ancient Israel, that tells a homeowner that he has an obligation to protect his family and visitors to his home from falling off the roof of their homes. To the modern mind, that doesn't make a lot of sense, because we have all these sloped roofs with shingles on them. And the only people that go up there are kids who like to run around on the roof and get in trouble yelled at by their parents. But that's not the way it was back in ancient Israel. Most of them tended to have flat roofs because what would happen was, the people would go up on their roofs in the evening when it was hot, and they would be able in the hot homes, and they would be able to get the advantage of the coolness that was coming into the evening on that. Well, of course, if that were to happen, they were flat roofs, people could fall off and hurt themselves. And so the Bible commanded people to put railings around their households, the roofs of their house so that people wouldn't fall off. Well, what does that tell us about the ethical responsibilities of a business owner and in today's world? Well, let's just say that that business person is a homebuilder. So in most cases, as we know, we don't have root roots where the roots are flat, right there, they don't need a rail around them. But yet, the obligations of these homeowners are still the same. If we look at it from like, the general equity, the intent of these laws, so home builder today, for instance, should build a rail, on the balcony of the second floor of a home that he built, he would be under an ethical obligation to build that we would need laws, code, building codes and things like that, to do that he should be under these obligations from a ethical moral standpoint, not to say there can't be some, some laws about this. But But that comes from this biblical concept, not from just a set of laws that are out there. Or if he builds a pool into a home, he may have an obligation to put a fence around the pool to protect children, and the household and the children of visitors. So there's a lot of ways we can look at this. And there's a lot of variables, but but that just gives us an idea of that. But then we come to the situation well, what if a business owner fails in his obligations and someone is hurt? What happens then from this biblical perspective? Well, of course, today, we know how that would go, we would have probably some building code thing come along, and, and the court the regulators would come in from the city of Austin. And they would said this code, this house wasn't built to code, and they would come and prosecute them and do all these kinds of things. But and of course, there would have been a lot of regulation going on beforehand, they would have had inspectors coming in all the way through the process and telling them now you didn't do this right and you didn't do this right. And you didn't do this right So the, the enforcement of these government regulations starts long before anybody's done anything wrong. But if we went back to the biblical perspective, that's not the case, what we would have is a would be a builder, free to build the home in the way that he and the homeowner thought were ethical, and right, the proper way to do things according to God's law, they wouldn't have a bunch of bureaucrats hovering over them, guiding there every step, every step. And then, as a product was finished, and something bad happened like that, well, we would have the courts to step in. But it wouldn't be the criminal courts that we often have today. In situations like this, it'd be the civil courts. Say, for instance, the homeowner, the builder did something that didn't, wasn't like the homeowner thought it would be, let's say just the construction of the second floor balcony where it was there. But it was very shoddy, and somebody leaned against the NFL. Well, rather than having criminal charges, and an army of regulators coming in and doing something about this, the owner of the home would be able to go to civil court. And this is the way it worked in the Old Testament, you'd be able to go before the city gates and talk to the elders of the city, and bring, bring charges if you will bring his case against him and seek damages. In the case of something like this happening. We don't you know, the Bible only had about 3000 laws in it. If you look at the Old Testament, that's where most of them were some of the New Testament about 3000 laws. It would seem to me today, that if the Bible can regulate all of human society, to 3000 laws, the I think I can't remember how many laws it was, but Well, in excess of 100,000 laws on the books in the United States today. I think it was a lot more than that. But we don't need all those laws, we could pare this down quite a bit. And we could also pare down the regulators and turn most of these things over to the courts, rather than to an army of bureaucrats today. And that's what we have today. So instead of having people being able to go to court, settle their differences, receive compensation for torts and harms against them. Instead, we have an army of regulators and bureaucrats who are just making laws, to not not just hold these businesses accountable, but to change the nature of the relationship between families out there doing business together, rather than the families to tide deciding the terms of the business relationship ships out there. Now we have a few bureaucrats and politicians making these decisions for us, they pass laws, they force laws, and often determine who is even guilty of violating these laws. They have become really not just judge, jury and executioner But lawmakers and police as well. In fact, they become the supreme authority in the land. And unlike the admonition in Romans 13, that civil authorities be a terror to bad conduct, they've actually become now a terror to good conduct. And in fact, they've made themselves to be more and more like God. Of course, this takes us back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve violated God's law, and exceeded God's delegation of authority to them in an effort to be like him. And this was, of course, the same thing that happened at the Tower of Babel, where they disobey God and instead of going out there and obeying His commandments to fill the earth, they gathered together and and tried to make for themselves a place in heaven, reaching up to heaven through this tower. Well, whenever we see a man trying to supplant God from His throne, and replace ourselves on the throne on his throne, we know that something very bad is going on. And as I hope I've shown today, and this is just the beginning of it, but hope at least I gave you some thought about how most economic regulation by civil government in the world today. It's just one more example of people in authority, violating God's prescribed order for man Time and trying to take his place. Well, thank you once again for being here with me on the Liberty cafe. And also, thanks to Texas scorecard our sponsor, please go on over to Texas scorecard.com and see what they have going for you today. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next timeTranscribed by https://otter.ai
Inflation is a deadly disease that is misunderstood by many. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we discuss why conservatives ought to pay almost as much attention to the Federal Reserve as they do to our elected politicians–none of whom can resist the temptation of inflation. This episode was transcribed by a robot called OtterAi. Please forgive any errors in the text, as robots still have a lot to learn:America is suffering through economic malaise. Inflation right now is the highest it's been in almost 50 years, and maybe even higher, and wages are not rising at nearly the same rate. As price increases, interest rates have increased dramatically, which has caused mortgage demand in new home construction to plummet. And a lot of commentators fear that 2023 may be the year that we fall into a real recession that even Biden and his group can't ignore and call something else. I want to talk about these things. And more on this week's episode 107 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, this is Bill Peacock, and welcome to episode 107 of the Liberty cafe. It's a blessing to have you here with me today. And a blessing to be a part of your listening each week. Hopefully each week, when you when you get up and listen to podcasts about what's going on in the world. Also a blessing to be part of the Texas scorecard network. They're the sponsor, the Liberty Cafe, and we along with you, I know out there are fighting every day to take upon oppression and get it out of our governmental system. So thanks for being here. So that music we just heard the second round of music you heard today was just a little tune from Shelby Lynn. It's called temptation. Here. Here's just a little bit of the words that she was saying there for you. Should I give into this temptation, temptation? Temptation? That's right. Should I give into this sweet temptation? Oh, yeah. The reason I had Miss Lin on today, briefly was because when we were talking about inflation, monetary policy, it also applies to a lot of other things related to this fiscal policy government spending, but particularly inflation leads to two real big areas of what we might call temptation. And the first one is, I think what we noticed more often is for politicians, the thing about inflation, when it comes for politicians is it's it's so easy to just go out and print more money, or have the people who work for you go print more money to get them out of their troubles. It's really pretty simple. So the government is spending too much money. And they're spending all they have plus more. But they start running into some problems. Where are they going to get more money? Well, one way is they can tax taxes more, but people start pushing back on that after a while. And so it makes it really hard. The other way, of course, they can do it as borrow more money. But the banks and the people who are lending money to the government start pushing back after a while as well. So what can they do with all that? Well, they can simply get the Federal Reserve, in this case in America to print more money. And of course, it's not quite as simple as printing more money today. There's all different kinds of ways that they can do this. But it basically has to do with the government, the federal reserve borrowing more money, or actually purchasing, purchasing things and then debt from other people and then turning around, and, and turning that into more money that can be borrowed from the Federal Reserve can go into the banks and people can borrow, it gets very complex. And we're not going to get into that today. But but the result of all that is, is that we have higher inflation. And what higher inflation does is two things. It makes the money that the government has to pay back in the future, worth less. And so it doesn't cost them as much to pay back the money that they've already borrowed, when the money was worth more. The second thing does that inflation dries up people into the next tax bracket. So if you're earning so much money this year, and then you earn more money next year, but you're not earning more money, because because you're really being more productive. It's just the government's trying to keep up with inflation. All of a sudden, you're driven into the next tax bracket and so you start paying more taxes, even though the government didn't have to go out and raise your taxes where you could see it. And so it's really tempting for politicians to push For more inflation, and of course, that's been going on for a long, long 1000s of years that's been going on. And for 100 plus years since the Federal Reserve was created here back in, I think 1913, or something like that. The other temptation is one that conservatives actually get into. We're not going to talk about that too much today. But there's this, this movement in the conservative circles, some conservative circles, that increases in the money supply, it's not necessarily harmful at all, or it's just not as harmful, as some people would say it is in terms of promoting inflation. And there's a book out there by called Miss inflation by David Bahnson. And Douglas Wilson. And Douglas Wilson, is, I think, one of the most brilliant commentators of our age on both just general, what's going on out there generally in the world, and also, of course, on his exposition of Scripture, and understanding what Scripture means and how to defend the faith. And he's great. And so it's kind of hard for me to point to something that he's done and say, I think he's got this wrong. But I think in the case of this book, I think he's got it wrong. I think it's mainly because of David Bronson's view, and has influenced him on this. And so anyway, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time today talking about this. But But I think really what they're under what they're doing here is understating the damage, the devastating damage really caused by the Federal Reserve, which is the Bank of the United States, we don't really think of it that way. But it's really just the Bank of the United States. Not the first one is we'll figure out in just a minute. And so I think what I want to do here is make the case really, that if we want to solve all a lot of our problems, when it comes to money in the economy, it's not to print more money, but it's to get rid of the Federal Reserve. So let's move into this. As I pointed out at the opening, we're having some really tough times here fiscally and monetarily in the United States. Inflation is rampant. You know, we've got the highest inflation in almost 50 years. And it could be because they've changed the way they they count inflation, and measure inflation, it could be that it's the highest we've ever experienced, maybe back into the 20s, even something like that. It's just It's really high. Now. It's it's slowing down a little bit now. But it's been really high in the past. And, of course, a lot of our problems today are is government spending, Congress spending, state spending, city spending, just tons and tons of money, right, stimulus programs, and all those kinds of things. But when we when it comes to inflation, it's not government spending, that drives inflation. It's the Federal Reserve printing more money, or borrowing more money or buying more goods in order to get more money out of their circulation. However, they want to do it quantitative easing, however you want to name it. It's the Federal Reserve that causes inflation, not spending in Congress. So that's what we're going to focus on today. So what we have here is this this problem with the Federal Reserve that was created by fine Wall Street financiers, the you know, the Rockefellers and, and the folks back in those days, who made the Carnegie's who made money off of borrowing a lot of money, and banking, the banking industry in those kinds of things. They created the Federal Reserve got Congress to create the Federal Reserve, because they had a problem. They couldn't control what state banks were doing. And state banks often wanted money to count be hard and not be inflated. And that made money more expensive for these folks. So they wanted somebody to come along, who could control what the state banks were doing, and making money cheaper for them to get their hands on. And so that's where the Federal Reserve came from. And then back in the 1970s, Congress put what is called the dual mandate in place, this went in 1977. So they were they were told to maintain maximum employment along with stable prices. But the problem is, monetary policy can't do either one of those things that people think it can today but can't, monetary policy can't. Well, let me put it this way. It can't. It doesn't have anything to do with with real employment. And it doesn't have anything to do with some prices in the sense of how much things will cost here and there in relationship to each other. What it does though is it erases through the monetary policy through inflation can raise the overall price levels and make everything more expensive. And so monetary policy won't solve this. It can't solve the new new, the dual mandate, and never has been able to do that. So let me let's just look a little history lesson here to figure this out. In in 1977, for instance, when the Federal Reserve's interest rate was about 555, point 5%. But then it skyrocketed about 20% in the 1980s. And then it hit a 20 year low of about 3%. In 1993, minute popped back up to 5%. And it's plummeted to near zero for most the last 15 years or so before increasing to the current rate of nearly 4%. So it's clear that the Federal Reserve hasn't been able to mandate anything to do with like a stable interest rates in the economy. neither have they been able to do anything about an employment rate and keeping that stable. And it started out in 77, at 6.4%, then it went up the unemployment went up to 10.8% at two, and then nearly 10%, in 2009. before dropping to the current rate of about 3.7%, which is near 50, year low. The problem is it's not really near 50 year low, because the again, the way they count This is a lot of people just given up looking for work. And so they're taken once that happens, they're out, they're taken out of them the measurements, but real unemployment, if you measure it over time, it's still much higher than this 3.7%, which Oh, so again, we have the situation where the Federal Reserve can't maintain stable unemployment rates. And so if we see this on both sides of the dual mandate, you got to start figuring out that maybe the Federal Reserve can't control these things, because they're doing a bad job of it. And if they just worked harder, and did things better, they could they could solve this problem. Maybe instead, and after 50 years of failure, we should come to the conclusion that the Federal Reserve can't maintain stable prices, through interest rates and stable unemployment. Because it's impossible to control those things, ultimately, through the Federal Reserve, and through monetary policy. Actually, we don't have to just look at the last 50 years in order to figure this out. And we have a lot more history than that. We can go all the way back to 1791. That's in the first year of the George Washington administration. Right. He's just been elected president 1790. takes office. Yeah, well, maybe he takes office and in late, late 1790. Back then now is March, I think, actually, right. So this is the very first year. He's just been in office for a few months when Congress passes legislation to create the First National Bank, the First National Bank of the United States. And there was this big debate going on in the Washington administration, Alexander Hamilton, who was Washington's Treasury Secretary, really wanted this first US National Bank. Why did he want that? Well, he was closely tied to the northern financial and commercial interest. And they wanted again, to be able to control the money supply themselves, particularly when it came to dealing with the South and agricultural part of the the American economy. Because they want a greater control over them through for trade and all the types of reasons, right, because they were manufacturers and they wanted to get their hands on the goods coming out of the south it good prices and one thing that way they could do that was controlling the monetary supply. Well, Thomas Jefferson was opposed to the bank. Because he felt like and he was right about this, that the bank would benefit these commercial interests up in the north than it would for the average American, particularly those in the south. But unfortunately, Jefferson lost the debate, Hamilton one and George Washington signed the bill. Well, eventually, the First National Bank Charter expired and so Congress came along and passed a charter for the Second National Bank, which was every bit as problematic, even more so because this bank was controlled by private investors and a lot of those investors in The Second National Bank in the United States were foreign investors. And a lot of this money was being earned in the United States and taken out and going overseas. It was it was corporate cronyism at its finest. Well, there came time, for the second the charter for the Second Bank of the United States that had had to be renewed or it would go away. And so that was during the term of Andrew Jackson, when he was president United States. This would have been in the late 3020s, I think it was early 30s, the 18th 1800s. And so Congress passed a renewal of the charter. But Jackson vetoed the charter renewal. In in his in his veto message, he wrote that the bank, the second bank was unauthorized by the Constitution, severe versus to the rights of states and dangerous to the liberties of the people. He saw clearly the corporate cronyism aspects of this, that a national bank, controlled by the federal government and by the private interest involved in that only benefited those private interests, not the average Americans. Again, because they got control the money, monetary supply, who was going to get it, what interest rates were all those types of things. And that was the end of national banks in the United States until, again, the Federal Reserve was adopted by Congress, back in 1913. But of course, things hadn't changed. It was still a bad idea when that happened. And and we've got to, I've got a quote here from Murray Rothbard. He's an economist in the Austrian School. And he writes a little bit about what the problems were with the Federal Reserve. So let me just put this in here and read it. The financial elites of this country, notably, the Morgan Rockefellers, and Kuhn, Loeb interest, were responsible for putting through the Federal Reserve System. Again, we see here that a fat financial elites just benefited from this, and they knew they would, and they put it into place. And that's the same way it's going on today. There are a lot of problems going on. In America today. Here in Texas, where I live, we've got a bunch of Republicans running the government who usually act or often act quite a bit like Democrats, even over in the Texas House of Representatives. The Republicans actually put Democrats in charge of some pretty important committees over there, right. Our governor won't won't secure the border for the state, he wants the state to spend more money, our lieutenant governor wants to revamp our electricity market by giving a bunch of $8 billion of Texas consumers electricity, consumers money over to Berkshire Hathaway, right to have them come build new generation, guaranteed new generation, so that it's guaranteed that Dan Patrick, and the Texas Legislature won't get in trouble for another blackout. And as it doesn't matter how much money it costs to get there, as long as it's not their money, it's the taxpayers money, right. So we have all those kinds of problems. But that is compounded all the time. With inflation, and the printing of money, and the control of financial markets by a federal bank, which basically sets policies for all other banks, there's no competition for money. There's no competition for banks, which one's the best one, which one will earn you the most money, the very little competition going on in that market. So we've got to deal with the political problems, the policy problems, the fiscal problems, all the government spending over here. But as long as we have the Federal Reserve, it just complicates those things quite a bit. Because it messes up our understanding of how bad these other problems are, and where to go fix them. So I'm just here to say that if we really want to deal effectively, with the problems our politicians are causing us in all the decisions they make, we really need to go in and first of all, and get Congress to abolish the Federal Reserve, if we're willing to do that and take that on. It'll give us much more clarity about how to fix our more political problems, or actually or more policy problems that are dealt with at the legislative issue levels, whether it's at the federal level, the state level or the local level. Well, thanks for being here on the Liberty Cafe today. It's been great to have you along been a blessing to have you along And also again, great to be part of the Texas scorecard network, the sponsor of the Liberty cafe. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about the show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you're listening on. See you next time.Transcribed by https://otter.ai
A recent report projects that renewables will exceed natural gas as Texas’ primary source for electricity in 2023. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we discuss why this is very bad for Texas from both a practical and biblical perspective.
Christians and conservatives are rightly concerned about government’s assault on our God-given rights. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, though, we discuss why instead of playing whack-a-mole with each new assault from the left, we might be better off focusing on making Big Government small so it doesn’t have the resources to take over our lives. Transcribed by Otter.ai:As we are coming up on the New Year, legislatures all across the country are preparing to go into the session. That's true here in Texas where I live. It's true up in Washington, DC, where the federal government, federal legislature Congress meets. And so a lot of people are concerned about a lot of different things that need to be done. Conservatives, Christians, in particular, have a lot of things that need to be dealt with all this crazy stuff we're seeing there more and more from the left trying to impose this anti God, anti Christian, anti Jesus worldview on the rest of us and dishonor God in the process and do some really bad things. And I'm not saying that things like transgender effects on kids aren't important things that shouldn't be dealt with that they are bad and they should be dealt with. But I think sometimes we misplace our priorities and the fact that and because we forget that we really can't stop. And we'll never be successful in stopping big government from taking away our Annette. God given unalienable rights. And if we just focus on the rights themselves and protecting them, we're going to lose that battle. Instead, I'd suggest that the only successful path forward in dealing with all this, the path to liberty is for us to focus our efforts and attorney big government, into little government. We're going to talk about this more in detail. On this week's episode, Episode 105 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, my name is Bill Peacock, and I'm very glad to have you here with me, as I always am, I'm blessed to have you here as those who listened to the Liberty Cafe, and those who participate in the battle for freedom here in Texas, and across the United States. Maybe some of y'all are out there even listening to me, across the world Fighting for liberty, I really appreciate it. And of course, I'm also appreciating blessed by the folks over Texas scorecard, the sponsor of the Liberty Cafe are also doing great work in the battle for liberty. So go on over to Texas scorecard.com, and see what you can do see what they're doing and see what you can do to join them in the battle for liberty. All right, so let's kind of dive into this issue just a little bit more. We've got a lot of things going on here in Texas, and I'm sure all these other all you other folks and other states have them as well, not to mention what's going on up in Washington, DC, just here in Texas, the Texas Republican Party, but to get gather a list of eight priorities, that kind of layout what they want to achieve in the legislative session coming up. And there's a lot of important issues there. Right, the integrity of elections, getting stopping Republicans in the House from appointing Democrats as chairs of important committees or any committees for that matter, dealing further with abortion protecting the lives of the unborn, all this sexualizing of Texas kids, and mutilating Texas kid through the trans Gay Agenda. Also, there's the just the issue of the border and the continued invasion of foreign nurse aliens into Texas and what's going on with that there's parental rights in keeping public schools in Texas from from teaching our children this anti God agenda, particularly when it comes to gays and homosexuals and, and but just anything related to a worldview that doesn't teach what God wants us to be teaching our children who's gonna ownership as another one. So those are the big issues that they put together again, those are really important issues. But But I think if we're going to make headway on on these things, we've got to step back a little bit because going after these things is a little bit about like playing Whack a Mole. Integrity of elections. We hit that down, then all of a sudden, trans gender, mineralization of kids pops up, right? I mean, it just keeps going back and forth, and back and forth. We hit that one another one pops up. So I think we need to step back and figure it out. Okay, so we've got this problem with big government, right? What are we going to do to make big government small, so it really doesn't matter what the government does Here's the context I'd put that in. So if we go back all the way to 1700 or so, and look at the federal spending, and really, you don't have federal spending back in, in 1700, but you got that you had a lot of state spending, and then you had English spending, and then you had the American government coming in. And you look at federal spending as a percent of the US GDP. Since about the 18th century, moving up to today, you know, historically, back in the early the 1700s, in the early 1800s, the spending was about 2%. That meant that the spending of the federal government was 2% of the overall size of the economy that jumped up during the Civil War to 4%. fell back to 3%. And then, we moved into the 19th 1900s. And we had World War One, which took it up to over 8%, and dropped back down under good Calvin Coolidge down to about 5%. And then FDR got a hold of it and went up to 10%. And then we got World War Two, and it jumped up to 28%. It and it really hasn't gone down much since that time. If you look at by decade, by decade, the lowest it got during that whole time after World War Two is about 20%. So that's 10 times government 10 times the size of government, that it wasn't in colonial days. And, you know, if we go back to only to the early 1900s, it's still about seven times as big as it was. Back in those days, and now we've got a whole new ballgame at work here. For 22,020 and 21, federal government spending is 37% of the economy. Now, we don't have 2022 numbers yet. And so we'll we'll see what those look like it might have gone down a little bit. But you know, given what they've been doing this year, I'm not so sure that's going to be the case. And so all of a sudden, we have this massive takeover of the American economy. But you know, it's not just the economy. It's our lives as we see it more and more, because a government that has enough money to make up over a third of the economy also has enough money to come after us and our rights. And that's the point I'm trying to make here that there's no way that we can stop a government that is this massive, and this big, from going after us and our rights that God has given us life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, however, we want to describe those things. And it's just getting worse and worse. Same thing is going on here in Texas, right. And I won't go through all the numbers. But for 2020, the share of Texas State and local spending, as a percent of gross state product is almost 18%. That's the highest it's ever been the highest had gotten before was 17%. As recently as 2014, it was down to about 15%. But particularly since Dan, Patrick, and Greg Abbott have taken over in their leadership roles. We've gone from 15%, all the way up now to over 18% massive increases in government involvement here in Texas. And, you know, while we may think and believe, and probably rightly so that what Texas government is doing is not nearly as bad as what the federal government is doing. They're still doing a lot of bad things here in Texas. And we've seen all kinds of examples of that public schools are just one example of that. And of course, the problem is not going to get any better. Matter of fact, it's getting worse very quickly. The Texas legislature is dealing with or not dealing with but has right standing before them a $27 billion budget surplus this biennium. And our comptroller Clint Hager has said it's going to be bigger than that by the time the legislature gets into town. So let's just go with $30 billion. And that's just what they have extra leftover from this biennium, two year budget cycle. If you look forward into the next two year budget cycle, which is the the budget they're going to be adopting in January and going forward, they're going to have another my guess is probably another 15 billion extra dollars, at least. So we're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of $45 billion more than they spent or spinning right Now, on Texas government, that's over a two year period. But that's still a lot of money. And while we would all love to see most of that money returned to us in the form of tax cuts, like How about getting rid of property taxes, or at least the school property taxes or reducing the sales tax? Texas House Speaker David feelin just this week, indicated that he has no interest in something like that, that with inflation going on, they're just no telling how much it's going to take to run Texas government. And we need to make sure we save that money so that we can run Texas government. Of course, what he's saying is we need to have that money to run Texas government. So we can, Texas government can run your lives and push this left wing LBGT Q agenda on you, Texas taxpayers and citizens so that it just is continuing to get worse and worse and worse than that. Another example of this is the Texas electricity grid. Right, everybody remembers how things fell apart in Texas. And we had historic blackouts and 2021. The main cause of those Well, yeah, the main cause of those being government intervention in the Texas electric grid, right? Yes, it got really cold. But if the government hadn't spent the last 20 years or so 15 years or so before that intervening in the market, because it's kind of funny what they did. But 2005 Or so they started getting scared of competition. And they go, no, no prices are getting too high. We need to start regulating the market. So to keep the prices low, and they did, they went after companies and fined a millions of dollars or attempted to anyway, and trying to push the price low. Well, they were successful in some ways. And that then came along renewable energy subsidies, pushing the price of electricity any lower, just to make clear, it didn't make electricity, electricity cheaper. It simply made the market price go lower. But we're still paying higher prices for it through through income taxes and property taxes, all the subsidies that were going into renewable energy. So because of subsidies and intervention in the market by regulators, electricity prices started going down four, and the profits started going down for people who were investing in reliable generation of natural gas, particularly those who wanted to build plants that were powered by natural gas. So guess what, people stopped building those plants. And they started building plants made by or powered by wind in the sun. And so what we've had over the years, is that the massive amount of electricity has gone. Money has gone into chasing these subsidies, it's been about $26 billion worth of subsidies over the period of time, that has resulted in investments about $66 billion of investments chasing those renewable subsidies. And then when we put into a take into account the the IRA, what was that the inflation Reduction Act that the Biden administration and Congress recently passed, and this new plan that the Texas Public Utility Commission has put in place to restructure the market because it wasn't working. Of course, it wasn't working, because they were interfering with it, but now they're going to interfere with it more. If you put those two together, we're going to go from renewables being about 85% of the share of new generation over the last four years or so, to renewables been 98% of all new generation over the next five years. So they haven't fixed a thing. Matter of fact, they're making it worse and they're ignoring it. So why is all this happening? Well, of course, it's all happening. Because government is too big, right? They get into our lives, they take our money, and then they have all this money, and all these people who can tell us what to do, and push this trans, gay, non Christian, non Liberty oriented, crony corporatist agenda on us all. And if we just focus on those things, again, we have to fight skirmishes and battles on those things. We can't just abandon those. But if that's all we're focusing on, we're going to lose the battle. And I think that's part of the problem today because I look around And I see very few people willing to stand up and take on growth and government spending. That's one reason that the Texas Legislature has failed miserably over the last 25 years in their efforts to bring property tax relief to Texas five times. Since then Governor George W. Bush started the effort to bring property tax relief, they have spent billions and billions of dollars. That's how they do it, they spend billions of dollars to give us property tax relief. Yet what happens is does billions of dollars get spent mainly on schools, but we see very little or zero, in most cases, property tax relief out of that, they spend more money, our property taxes go up, other taxes go up, and we lose, nobody will stand up and say, We're spending too much money. You know, we focus on taxes and tax relief, and that's good. But the only reason our taxes keep going up, is because spending keeps going up. And so if we're going to fight this, and we should fight it, then we need to shift our focus a little bit, and put more emphasis on making big government into small government. And I've got a few recommendations here about how we can do that. First, we need to adopt what I call the Liberty budget, that's a zero growth, budget, zero growth and state spending. So when we like the legislature comes into session in January, they look at how much they spent last session, that's all they can spend this session under the Liberty budget, they can't spend any more, I would suggest if they did that, we would have a budget surplus, they would have a budget surplus of about 40 to $45 billion. And they could immediately use that money to start buying down property taxes, school property taxes, and or sales taxes. It would be easy to do you just now I think ultimately, we need to reverse the size of government make it smaller. So even a zero growth budget only takes us so far. But it's a good place to start. Now trying to make that happen. It's simple. But it's not easy. But it's a place we have to start, we have to stop state government from growing because if you ask yourself, do you think government's already too big? And you say no, then you shouldn't be worried about doing things like oh, we got to allow for population growth plus inflation, because they're already doing too much. So we stopped them. And then population growth plus inflation, just makes them focus on doing what they're already doing more efficiently or stop doing some things they're doing because they shouldn't be doing them in the first place. So that's number one. Number two, I think we need to make all local governments get permission to increase property taxes at all. Right now, there's an something in place called the new revenue tax rate, where it doesn't create any new revenue from existing developed properties. If people go out and somebody takes a piece of empty land and builds a new building on it, that's not the revenue from that the property tax revenues not included in that calculation. So. So if we change the situation where you had to go to voters, if they wanted to exceed this no new tax rate, you would still allow local government spending to increase by a percent or two, which I don't think is a good idea at one level, but it's a good place to start. And then if the local government wants to spend more money, they can go to the taxpayers, the local taxpayers and ask them, and if the taxpayers think that's a good thing, well, they can give them permission to do that at the polls. I think ultimately, you have to work on that even. But it's a good place to start slow the growth of local government spending, we also need to get control over education spending, the first place to do that is just freeze school property taxes, we can't let them go up anymore. And then we need to use a lot of this budget surplus just to buy down school MnO property taxes until they're gone. We if we did that, with zero growth, we could do that in about seven years, seven, eight years or so school taxes would go away really quickly if we did that. And as we stopped school property taxes, and the state gets better control over the funding of schools, then we could also and this also would apply to higher education. We could stop this runaway growth of spending for higher education and public schools. The next thing I think we need to do is get Texas government out of that energy business because all that money, all those interventions in the market that the Texas government is is doing right now. It's going to cost Texans about $6 billion a year. That's a pretty big tax, if they tried to pass that through the legislature, nobody would stand for it. But since they're doing it in the backroom, so the Texas Public Utility Commission, nobody's really paying attention to that. So we just need to get the government out of energy markets like they should be out of most markets. And let let the markets and the people involved in the markets decide that there's a big $6 billion tax cut, which would end a lot of the corny corporate cronyism that's going on here in America, we also need to just get out of Medicaid. As long as the federal government is controlling a huge portion of state spending, I think it's about 25% of all the state funds that we spend goes into Medicaid, I could be wrong, but it's in that ballpark. As long as the federal government's controlling that we just can't do anything to really cut the size and scope of Texas government. So we need to get out of Medicaid. There's a lot of smart people who can figure out how to do what the state is doing with Medicaid more efficiently than what they're making us do in Washington, DC. And as we go through that process, we would probably see that there's a lot of things that we shouldn't be doing at all, and that charity, and people could take care of these things for themselves. And then finally, we should spend a lot of time defunding the Texas regulatory state, with people telling us how to run our business and our lives, those types of things. Alright, so that's what I think we need to do and focus on those things, if to make big government small. And so because small government won't be doing the things that we're most worried about, ruining our lives, running our lives, ruining our children, teaching them things that they shouldn't know and learn. And so that's the path forward, I would suggest for making big government small. Well, thank you for joining me on today's Liberty cafe, Episode 105. And thanks again to Texas scorecard for being the sponsor of the Liberty cafe. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next time.
Ever since the 2021 blackout, Texas politicians have been trying to cover up their role in bringing it about. Now, they are at it again. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we’ll look at new plan from the Public Utility Commission of Texas to redesign the electric grid that could lead to the end of affordable electricity for Texans.
Transcribed by Otter.ai:
No one over the age of 10 will ever forget the great Texas blackout of 2021. We are plunged into third world literally third world conditions. And so ever since that time, Texas politicians, Texas regulators, and Texas generators, in particular, have been scrambling to cover up their leading roles in bringing that about. And now they're at it again. Last week, the Public Utility Commission of Texas issued a report that is describing the path forward, there's a lot of options there. Still, nothing's been finalized. But the general path forward for a total market redesign of ERCOT, which is the electricity market that covers most of Texas. So this week, on Episode 104, of the Liberty cafe, we're going to talk about how this may spell the end of an affordable and reliable supply of electricity in Texas. Hi, this is Bill Peacock, and welcome to Liberty cafe. As always, it's a blessing to have you here with me, it's a blessing to have you listening, then it's a blessing to be taking part in the battle for liberty with you, as we fight this battle here in Texas, and it's also of course, a blessing to be part of the fight with Texas scorecard, a great group of men and women fighting for liberty, and spreading news of that fight to everywhere and showing us as Texans where we need to concentrate our efforts. And as Christians, where we need to focus and concentrate our prayers. So we're gonna get in today to this new PUC plan, and I'm going to strive it can get really technical. And I'm going to strive just to keep it plain for for all of us, really, because the one of the things that big government and big government advocates use to to help us help confuse us about things as they make everything really complex. And through all this complexity, it's really hard to see the truth. And of course, that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to turn us away from the truth for a variety of reasons. But one is, in this case, they don't want to be held responsible for what they have done to assist the collapse of the Texas electricity market. And then some folks in government just don't want us to see the truth at all, because they're in the process of trying to turn our government into a tyranny. So let's go back just briefly, to the Great Texas blackout of 2021. There's so much that went on during that time. And I don't need to remind most of you of what happened. So I'm not going to get back into that what I want to do is just look at talk about the three primary factors that we have to focus on. When we're thinking about what happened. Number one, it got really cold, it was a record cold event, it was the coldest the Texas has ever been in my entire life. And I was born in 1959. So that that gets us close to a one in 100 year event, a true one in 100 year event. And Texas just wasn't ready for it. Because for the most part, Texas shouldn't be ready, in some ways for one and 100 year event. We can make plans and we can try to mitigate things. But there's no way. If we spent all the money, we needed to protect ourselves from every one and 100 year event, whether it's flooding or rain or heat or whatever, we'd go broke. And so we have to moderate how much money we spend on things. So that's factor number one, it was really cold. Factor Number two are subsidies for renewable energy that has been going on here in Texas, since about 1999 or so just depends on where you start counting. And it certainly wasn't very much in those early years. But it's grown rapidly, both at the federal level and the state level. And the local level for this year, for instance, there's gonna be over $2 billion worth of subsidies for renewable energy, and that's trailed off a little bit, although it's probably going to pick up pretty soon again, with the all the renewable subsidies the new renewable subsidies contained in the inflation Reduction Act that our government recently passed with Mike had the help of Republicans in both the House and the Senate. So there's factor number two, that has caused a tremendous increase in renewable energy production here in Texas, wind and solar, which is flooded and disrupted the Texas market. And then number three is the manipulation of prices. So one of the big problems of course, with the blackout was, we were we didn't have electricity. And that was a big problem that that had something to do with it being really cold. It had a lot to do with there being subsidies for renewable energy. And it also had something to do with the manipulation, excuse me, the manipulation of prices. Because what had been going on for years in the PUC is that it was so scared of these companies, big generation companies, manipulating prices themselves, and earning too much profit, market power abuse, exercising market power, and abusing their market power is the one of the economic terms for that, that the PC went the other way, they forced prices down. Now, it was partly, a significant part of that was the renewable energy subsidies driving prices down. But another not the cost, by the way, because the subsidies came out of our pocket books from our tax bills, right. So we pay for electricity two ways today through tax bills, both income taxes and property taxes, and through our electric bills. So just because we may pay a lower price for some renewable energy, doesn't mean it costs less, it just means they're hiding, how we're paying for it. And so these, so the government was pushing down the prices of electricity, through these renewable subsidies, but also through other interventions in the marketplace, because they were afraid of generators making too much money. Well, guess what happened, they were really successful. And turns out generators weren't making enough money, or at least, not enough money to really invest in the new natural gas fired generation that we need here in Texas to keep the lights on. Now, that hasn't always been the case, we went to what we call the energy only market, where basically, we're just paying for electricity that we buy, which is the way the market should be. And that worked well from 2000 or so when that got started through about 2013 or 14, but, but the manipulation of prices got so bad by the PUC and in the entities that regulate electricity in Texas, that the market started failing in many ways. And that's why we ran into the problem we ran into in 2021. So a lot of people would look at the perspective of the blackouts. And say that it was the cold. The cold was the main proponent, the main cause of the blackouts, and that and perhaps a lack of winterization by irresponsible generators. So that's kind of the party line from politicians, and regulators and generators, except the generators don't call themselves irresponsible. But I would suggest to you that the real problem is, was the renewable energy subsidies over billions and billions of dollars, over 20 plus years in the Texas market, and the ongoing manipulation of prices, because if you recall, it wasn't just that we're out of electricity. It's that electricity got really expensive. So the prices go up when you have a shortage. And that happened here in Texas. And during the winter storm, the price of electricity per per megawatt hour was went up from Oh, you know, the average if you just look on any given day, it's probably around $50. That wide variations but about $50. But on the day that the winter storm really hit that Monday, Monday morning, Monday afternoon, prices were at about $2,000. But the PC just off the top of its head arbitrarily and capriciously decided to raise prices to $9,000. Their rationale was, well, if we raise prices, people more people will sell electricity. But the big flaw in their rationale and in their minds was that there was no more electricity to be sold. The winter storm had knocked out a lot of power. Everybody was already trying to get their generation back online because a lot of generators were losing money. They still had generation to supply to people, and if they couldn't do it, they had to go by it to honor their contracts. But the PUC raised their prices, the prices to $9,000 per megawatt. And, and what happened was, and they kept it there for like three days. And so we pulled up a bill. And it's counted a lot of different ways, but 16 billion 30 billion, but whatever the particular more people would put on it, Texan spent more for electricity in the week, two weeks around the winter storm URI than they had in the previous two years combined. So that's the big picture of what we're looking at. So we get to last week. And as the Public Utility Commission, had been tasked by Governor Greg Abbott, about a year ago, last July, to make a totally redesign the electricity market here in Texas called the market redesign. And so, the PUC had hired this company, e three is what it's called. Let's see, I have it written down here somewhere. No, I can't see it. But it's energy and electricity, and something else. Anyway. E three. And so over the last several months, e three has been putting together this report now it's E threes report, but trust me, the PC has had a significant amount of input into what this report will look like. And some some of the things I know for a fact that are in this report II three really doesn't like but they were told to put it in by the PUC. And so they did. And so they're, it's a total mess. And why is it a total mess? What there are three main reasons for that. And I'll go through them briefly right now, number one. So what the PUC report, the E three report does, it just doubles down on the status quo. So they go through, and they create six alternative forms of energy markets that we might be able to use here in Texas. And they weigh those against what they call their status quo option. And so they look at the costs of the the six options, and they look at the reliability of these six options. And they say, Okay, this option number one, is cost this much more than the status quo. And this option number two, brings this much more reliability than the status quo. But what they don't do is, look at the status quo, the energy only market in Texas, and look at that and say, well, the status quo is not good. Why don't we because it's not really an energy only market. Why don't we model what a true energy only market looks like? Maybe the what the market looked like in Texas 10 years ago, or something like that, or even better, just what a true energy only market would look like, and then model that and then compare these new models, these new alternatives to what a real energy only market would look like. But but they don't do that. Because everybody, the politicians and the regulators, and the generators all want to get away from the energy only market, the politicians want to get away from it. And the regulators really want to get away from an energy only market because they can't control it. And if they can't control it, they're afraid that they're gonna get blamed for something that they weren't in control of. And so they think that they can control it and keep bad things from happening. Well, that's not going to happen. But that's what they envision in their minds. Because what they if they go back to 2021, they think the problem was that they weren't in control. And if they had been in control, we wouldn't have had these blackouts. The truth is, they were in control. And a lot of ways they were manipulating prices, they're throwing subsidies at renewable energy and traditional generators. And that's what really messed up the market. So they think doubling down on the interventions that they have been doing for the last 10 years or so is going to make things better, but it's not. And of course, the generators want to get away from energy only market because they don't like competing. When Texas first went to this model, it was the only state in Texas and one of the few places in the entire world that allowed market prices generally to set the the price of electricity market forces to set the market price of electricity rather than having regulators involved in all that. And it first regulators. I mean, generators are making money hand over fist because there are high gas prices and a lot of factors. But then once the market got into play and competition really dug in. Some of the generators stopped making money, some of them went bankrupt. And it's the only state where these big companies have to do that. And they decided they liked a lot better going to these other states and asking regulators to give them money from the consumers. And rather than having to go to the consumers themselves, and ask for money, because they have this, this regulatory system all set out, and they could get themselves better profits for less work through a regulated system. So that that's why the generators want to get rid of this energy only system. And so that's the first big flaw of this report by the PUC. And an E three, is it just doubles down and provides more regulation on top of the failed regulation that we've already seen. The second one. The second flaw in all this is that the E three report doesn't provide a path for slowing or stopping the growth of renewable energy, intermittent generation, which is renewable energy, because why is it intermittent, because a natural gas plant, for instance, can generate electricity 24 hours a day, basically, on call, now, you know, it's going to have some downtime for maintenance and those types of things. But they run, I can't remember the exact term, but probably 97 98% of the time they're generating, they run about that much of their capacity. But that's not true for wind and solar, the wind, wind power can only generate electricity when the winds blowing. And quite often, it's not blowing when we need it the most, like four or five o'clock in the afternoon, or at 1am. On a cold February morning, when freezing temperatures are down. And around 10 degrees across the state, there was no wind, of course, we have the same problem with solar, right, solar at least has the benefit of generating electricity during the day, on a regular basis when we need it. But it's still intermittent because of the clouds come by. There's a problem that happened. This dismay, I think it was where it was really hot. Over in East Texas, Austin, basically and east of here. But Cloud Cover came over West Texas where all the wind is most of the wind is and it messed up the whole system. And we had a nearly a bad event come out of that. And of course, solar power was nowhere to be found again at 1am on that freezing cold Monday morning back in February. So that's what intermittency means. Yet, over the last, let's go back to 15 years or so to 2007. Renewables have just overloaded the system. Right. So if we go back to 2007, nuclear gas and coal generation made up about 94% of the electricity generated in Texas, when was 2.9% Solar was non existent. But today, what has happened is that solar and when combined now make up 37% of the electricity generated in Texas that's so far in 2022, gas, coal, and nuclear all of a sudden, are down to about 59% 59%. And in fact, when now generates at 32% generates more electricity in Texas than does gas. Well, you can see some of the problems that creates, in that we're so heavily reliant on wind and solar. And if we need electricity, we can't count on it being there. That's a big problem. And that's one of the problems we see in the summer all the time. And particularly a couple of times, specifically back to 2021. On on when it comes to the intermittency problems of renewable energy. And so the last thing I want to talk about is how this new market design they're coming up with and it really doesn't matter which design they go with. There's a favorite one, the chairman of the PUC has a favored part of the proposal and not all the people on the five member PC agree with him. But that seems to be the direction they're heading. But whichever one they go with, it's going to cost Texans billions of dollars. And there's all kinds of money, places where this money is coming from, for instance right now. Well, back in January, the PC increased the operation of what is known as the operating reserve demand curve or the RDC. It's very highly technical. I don't understand all of it, but basically what it does is it it has the PC and ERCOT managers have made the decision that the market doesn't work so that the demand curves in this market for whatever reason aren't working. And so the RDC is a bureaucratic effort to replace the market. Price curves. And they do that. And what they do is when certain conditions, particularly tight conditions when, when we're getting when generation is getting, or Wintley Put another way, when demand is getting close to the maximum generation that we have available, it starts artificially increasing prices. Now, why does it do that? Well, they would tell you that it's the hope that more people will come in and sell electricity. But why they're really doing it. It's just a straight subsidy, that generators who have been complaining for a decade or so now that they're not making enough money. And so they, this is literally the truth they put us or DC in for an only reason to do that was to get more money to generators. Now, did generators need more money, maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But if they did need more money, the reason they were running short on money was because the problems that renewable energy subsidies were causing and dropping prices on the market, because renewable energy generators so low a lot, because they're getting all these subsidies, so they can actually sell below market prices, and still make a profit because of their subsidies. And then of course, the other reason was the market manipulation by PC regulators who were scared to death of these companies making too much money. So go figure so so that that is about $2 billion. So far this year, it could go a little bit higher before we get to the end of the year, the RDC. And one study is estimated that it will add at least an additional 1.3 billion on top of that next year. So next year, the RDC could cost Texas consumers about $3.3 billion. So there's $3 billion of the cost, then there's all the cost of what's known as securitization, remember, we had that $16 billion electricity bill from 2021. Well, rather than make consumers pay all that at one time, what they did was the state allowed these companies that are so electricity and part of these costs are also in natural gas sellers, retailers, to go out and borrow money bond, sell bonds, and use those bonds to pay the high bills that they faced, because, you know, some of these retailers just went broke. Others were able to survive and go sell these bonds. And then now we as consumers are going to be paying those bonds off for the next 30 years or so there's another will about $10.5 billion or so cost that's over the whole period of time, that should run out to about $400 million per year, we're paying extra on that. And then on top of that, there's just the cost of renewable energy subsidies, right from, as I mentioned before, it's about $2 billion this year. And just to break that down for you about 237 million that's coming from property tax abatements at the local level, about 700 million of that is coming from state subsidies of different sorts, and about 1.2 billion of that's coming from the federal government. So if you add all those costs up, plus about the $400 million cost, that the three report says the new alternatives are going to cost, you add all that up, and it looks like by the year 2026, when that comes around, Texas will be spending $6.4 billion more on electricity, then the real true market price for electricity. And all that is coming about because politicians in Texas are scared to admit their fault that they've been subsidizing renewable energy and traditional energy generation for years, manipulating prices for years. And they don't want you to know that they cause all this problem. And so rather than have you find out why things went wrong, then they're just going to make you pay more money and pretend like it never happened. Now there is a way out of this. And basically, the bottom line here is to get government get politicians get regulators out of the electricity business. And let buyers that's us, you and me and Exxon Mobil and target and small businesses, let the buyers work with the sellers through a market and decide what the prices need to be that that works everywhere. I know some people get scared that how can I stay Not too big company, but it works all the time talks about clothes. It works with computers, it works with all kinds of things, go to Ikea, look at the prices there, go try and buy a you know, a laptop now doesn't mean that inflation isn't getting in the way of all that today, but still it works. And so if we just let buyers and sellers work together, eliminate all the subsidies and all these manipulations of prices. All of us here in Texas can have an affordable and reliable supply of electricity. Well, thank you for being with me today on the Liberty Cafe blessing to have you here with me and please go on over to Texas scorecard.com and see what you can do to contribute to the battle for liberty in Texas.
The reactions of many people to this week’s elections seem to indicate they think their world is being turned upside down. On this week’s Liberty Café, we examine how many of those people are upset that the world is actually being turned right-side up as Jesus Christ is proclaimed as Lord.
High property taxes, a porous border, and failed government schools concern many Texans. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we talk with Don Huffines about how to address these problems and further secure liberty in Texas.
Transcribed by Otter.ai:
Bill Peacock Property taxes are robbing Texans, robbing them of their wealth and their homes and businesses. Or Don Huffines, a husband, father, businessman, former Texas State Senator, and founder of Texas's newest free market, think tank, believes Texans have something even more important at stake in the battle over property taxes, their liberty, we'll be talking with Don about these issues and more on episode 102 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, this is Bill peacock. Welcome to the Liberty cafe. I'm blessed to have you here with me. And of course, also blessed to be sponsored on the Liberty cafe by Texas scorecard. So please run over to Texas scorecard.com, and see how you can engage and get involved in the battle for Liberty here in Texas. Well, our special guest today is Don Hofheinz on the Liberty cafe. And the occasion for this is that the Hofheinz Liberty foundation is releasing its first paper about this time on property taxes and the problems with property taxes in Texas, you can run over to have fans liberty.com and learn more about it and see some of the solutions that they're talking about. But let me just give you a couple of stats here. Texans last year paid $73 billion in property taxes. That's up from 40 point 5 billion just 10 years ago 38 billion of the 78 billion of that money goes to government schools than the state kicks in another 30 billion on top of that, which means that a total of 68 billion of our tax dollars are being spent to tell children, our children that there's no God that boys can become girls and girls can come become boys, and that we must erased Western civilization to atone for our racist past. And yeah, they often fail to teach our children, many of them anyway how to read write and think. So whether one thinks that the public education system in Texas should be reformed or abolished the problems we see in government schools, points to the concerns about liberty that our guest today Don halftones has when it comes to the property tax and many other problems with government that we're dealing with today. So before we get to Don, let me just in full disclosure, let you know that that I work for Don, I'm part of the Hofheinz Liberty foundation, I do research and writing and whatever else needs to be done in the small think tank that we are. So just just full disclosure on that. So welcome, Don to the Liberty cafe. Well, thank you, Bill. It's great to be on your podcast. I know how successful it is. So let's well thank you very much. I appreciate that. So Don, you've gone from being a state senator, to gubernatorial candidate, and now to a founder of a think tank. What got you started on this journey?
Don Huffines Well, that's a good question, Bill. It I have just been lucky. I always say, I've always had this burning sensation in my heart on a call. And I played with Liberty since I was a teenager. And it just never goes out. Sometimes it burns really bright and heavy. And other times it doesn't and but it's always there. And I think a lot of Texans feel the same way. And we just I just want to be free. I just want to live in my mind free to the government. I don't trust the government for any reason. Pay look to be a true patriot, always questions government, and always had. And so when I ran for office, a federal account was acting before I ran for office in 13. It's something that I was always generally helping candidates that I felt were the most conservative. I was a delegate to three national conventions have been delegates and many many say conventions over 30 years. When I ran, I ran for office in Texas senate for senate district 16 in Dallas County. Again, it's a 20 year plus incumbent who was one of the most liberal Republicans in Austin and I won in the primary. But I read specifically because we had the solutions, solutions to Texas problems and it's the same reason the main reason I ran for governor is because I have solution oriented, policy oriented. I want to solve the problems and affect taxes. I want to cut the chains and government and let people be free so they can make their own decisions about what's bad. Sooner live and can we can create so much more prosperity doing that. And it's really rare that you find any Canada or any office owner that's willing to come up with solutions. And you want to be in an Austin. There's a reason they don't do that. And that is because oh my gosh, they might have to be accountable to the voters if they come up with a solution. So, and I've always wanted to be accountable to the voters. And as you probably know, when I was in law said, for years, that I'm the only elected office or Texas history that never took any money from the state. I don't know if you knew that. But I never took attention or reimbursement Expense Report. Nothing for me personally, ever, because I never worked for the government. I really knew that and it only worked for the people on so there's just a big disconnect in a SWOT analysis.
Bill Peacock Well, I think you talked about, some politicians don't want to be held accountable to the voters. Another reason sometimes they don't like solutions, because they don't want to make the special interest that kind of hold sway and Austin upset, right. So if you actually came up to a real solution, to say something like property taxes, a lot of people in and around Austin wouldn't like that. And so So certainly,
Don Huffines what do they know where their bread is? Buttered?
Bill Peacock And so that kind of points us to this paper. So the roof is already foundation? You started it back this past summer, right?
Don Huffines It started somewhere in here, not 22.
Bill Peacock Okay. And so you're now just coming out with your first paper, and it's on property taxes? Why are you leading with property taxes?
Don Huffines Well, I think property taxes is, is just something that we can fix. And that will say my campaign for governor, I had a comprehensive plan on how we could abolish property taxes entirely. But so right now we're focused on in the Liberty foundation is focused on educating Texans, about the issues. And so they can hold their elected officers accountable to the solutions that we're coming up with. As you know, builder. This is a this is a three part series of papers that we're doing our property tax, and we're going to be releasing the first one, very shortly. And then the third one will be the conclusion. And then we'll have a one page summary sheet at the grassroots or even Texan.
Bill Peacock Politicians sometimes don't have a big attention span.
Don Huffines Yeah, we hope to get it to them. Yeah, of course, we'll be sending it to them elected officeholders, but it is gonna be a real simple solution to get rid of them and all taxes, school taxes, so we're gonna get rid of all school taxes, it's a golf, which is generally half or more of the property taxes, people pay taxes. First woman educated on how big of a problem it is. And where Texas stands in the nation with us. We have the highest some of the highest property taxes in the nation. And really what this is about, it's about our liberty, always. And that's why I picked this issue. I'm a firm believer in property rights. It's hard to have a property.
Bill Peacock Well, that's exactly the case is so the Texas Legislature has now for 25 or so years, been telling Texans that goes back to the administration of George W. Bush, and his five or six times told Texas, we're going to provide you property tax relief, but they failed every time. Every time they told us we're going to get relief. Property taxes has gone up and they've continued to go up and skyrocket over this time. Why do you think they can't solve this problem?
Don Huffines They don't want to they do not want to solve the problem. But Republicans, as you know, control everything in Austin for over 20 years. Are we statewide office, some of those 20 years we kind of supermajority in the same house to Texas Senate. We can even get a constitutional amendment study. We can get any bill done. We want any piece of legislation, really think that through you know, any piece of legislation we want that the Republican Party wants into law we could get it easily solved property tax problem. They don't want it they're not looking for solutions, not only for property tax, they're looking for solutions and watching anything. And I found that alpha numbers there and I was just always so why are they here? What is it they really all you know, they're just Oh great. We're gonna get term limits or we're gonna get rid of property tax or let's do this or that and get rid of the franchise tax and margins tax Well, that's right. That's not
Bill Peacock one of the things I noticed in the paper is that the big problem seems to be is they every time they try and fix property taxes and cut rates are increased the homestead exemption or whatever it is, they don't ever deal with, or not very well, at least the problem, the big problem is local government spending. Because property taxes are what fun, the spending at the local level. And if if the spending keeps going up, they're going to have to keep getting money from property taxes or some other source of funds. And, and so they really don't seem to be wanting to tackle the problem of high local government and school spending, maybe because they just think that it's easier to push off Texas taxpayers and distract us from the problem than it would be to tackle the local government officials and tell them they can't spend as much money.
Don Huffines Well, that's true. What you're saying is, it's always about spending. Government is never has enough taxpayers money. You're never going to have enough. If you wanted Republicans campaign or limited government. But in Texas, if you want limited government, the best way to get is to choke off the money. Because government only exists, basically, it's gotten the money. So it's always enough to spin. And also notice they were often worried about the revenue. But it's not the revenue they need or the taxpayers money, they need to worry about what they spend. So we can so this, our solution, as you know, is to getting rid of the tax and we're going to do is have the state of Texas take over all school funding related to tax. And I find that interesting anyway, that because the Democrats I'll take the stick who doesn't pay their share? Guess what? The state's gonna pay? 100%.
Bill Peacock Sakhalin? Yeah, so
Don Huffines it's gonna be it's gonna be a new day.
Bill Peacock Well, let's hope so. So the Hofheinz Liberty Institute has three primary initiatives. So we've already talked about property taxes, the other two are border security and education freedom. So let's talk about border security. Most of us, in Texas, I have a pretty good perspective because of our location, about the problems with in the state and really nation when it comes to the lack of border security. I guess this kind of gets back to the question about property taxes. But why don't you think anybody's willing to solve the problem on border security either?
Don Huffines Border Security is a little more complicated. There's really only one way to solve, effectively the border problem, this invasion, and that is what the governor, the governor, is the person that's going to be able to do it. The federal government never has to do at the border. And they never will. A lot of people think, well, we're gonna get the problem. And it's we'll get control of the House and Senate in the midterms. And I think they will, but to what avail? Because people will not have the presidency. Even if we did, we had the trifecta, Republicans sit on your trunk, the border is still open. He really was not open to desist today. I won't go into details below about how bad it is. I think most Texans realize that. But I'll tell you this, I was in New York recently. And I'm having dinner with a few folks out there. And they have really, these people are educated and smart. Read your paper, and they're all good. But they have no idea. Any idea of not how bad the board was, which I thought was surprising. But let's get back to the solution is with a courageous governor of Texas, you're gonna the governor of Texas can use article one section 10, which I've talked about throughout my campaign, even before the campaign, which gives the governor the authority to declare an invasion. And section one, article one section 10 enables a say to do whatever it needs to repel the invasion. Basically, you can negotiate a treaty with a foreign nation, you can get a contract with other states. You can raise an army you can charge attacks, basically do whatever you need to do to stop anybody Shouldn't the federal government's not going to come to your aid, which they obviously aren't, since they're participating in it.
Bill Peacock So,
Don Huffines but the governor is the one that can do that. And if he does, that, it's almost unlimited. The power that he's got to stop it, what we're talking about not enforcing immigration law. We're talking about sort of building an invasion, and doing whatever is necessary. You must anticipate what the federal government's got to do. I've always said, the key here is to hold Mexico accountable to the problem that they're causing. It's hard to have a good neighbor, Attorney fenced in economic pressure of Mexico. It's what's going to work. Remember when Bill you remember what Trump had the best results with Mexico?
Bill Peacock Yep.
Don Huffines What did he What did he do? It was just tariffs, because he already stuck on China. You know, the Mexican just freaked out, you know, oh, my gosh, you're wanting to tariffs, Texas does 250 million worth of trade with that economic pressure on Mexico, they will respond. There's a lot of ways to do that.
Bill Peacock Yeah, I think Trump got results because of the economic pressure, the threat of tariffs, but also from the threat that he was going to do a better job of securing the border, and Mexico was gonna get stuck with all these people. It stuck along their northern border, instead of in the southern United States, you got to have both of those things going on. Because Mexico doesn't want those people, the immigrants just stuck in their country, they're willing to let them pass through. But they don't want them to stay there.
Don Huffines That's true. That's true. And you probably know, border patrol in the last 12 months, it called illegals from under 16 different countries, these are not just Mexicans, Mexicans make up less than 40%. Hundreds of 1000s, potentially,
Bill Peacock so So you're you're wanting to work with cooperate, the other entities that are involved here you want to work with and cooperate, maybe put some pressure on Mexico, and also the federal government, but who you think is likely to be a better partner and cooperating if Texas takes these measures to take, we might work better with Mexico actually, then the federal government the way is looking today? Absolutely. Absolutely.
Don Huffines Mexico is the key. River. And if they're not going to cooperate, it's not we're never going to have a secure border. My goal would always seem to work with Mexico. And but with Karatbars today, and you got the big sick and you better be willing to use it. And I think the listeners really do and because they love making money and the cartels are running everything down here. So it's a matter of going across the river not paying off the cartels. And these of course, the most dangerous criminal organizations really world. But Mexico needs to take control of that. They need to try to take back the cartels and write them in and know it's not easy for them. There's Mexico's a beautiful country determine the subjects and the mass, which is it's unbelievable how much wealth is in that country and what opportunities are available for Texans to trade with Mexico on race and largest industrial city and it's in Mexico. And it's less than three hours from Laredo and Brownsville. I mean, we just got incredible opportunities in Mexico that we cannot utilize properly because of cartels. And I think that just needs to be communicated that we have to be willing to use the sick and that means shutting down the tray and stopping the tourism independence. You can't cut it or whatever we can do stop there were middles back on the money. There is a lot of pressure that governor with courage can implement to make Mexico secure their side.
Bill Peacock Some people are concerned that the this this solution is bold solution repelling an invasion might actually bring more conflict with the federal government and with Mexico. How do you respond to those concerns?
Don Huffines Well, it could and it probably will. The I think the Constitution is clear that the state of Texas can do that. And I think most Texans are for frustrated with most Republicans is that we're always on the defense. We're always responding. And we're not going to win the game doing. This is Texas, the governor of Texas has got a constitutional responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Texas military, which is our National Guard to repel an invasion. The federal government, remarkable for Scott constitutional responsibility repelled invasion. And if they're not, we've got the constitutional responsibility to repel repel it ourselves. And that means anyone aiding and abetting the enemy, like NGOs that are bringing them in part need to be arrested. They need to have their buses impounded. We'd love to be your partner, we're Border Patrol, and ice, but they're not cooperating propelling us invasion. We looked at it in ourselves, Texas can immediately deport anyone who crosses that river. We're not interested in visas. We're not interested in immigration law. This was a tradition in the United States and legal process for way over 100 years, the states were in charge of immigration, naturalization work, immigration is not in the Constitution. The word naturalization, it's those are two different words, completely different. This is a state issue historically. And it will be a separate issue going forward. Because Texas sovereign, yes, well, we're going to generate conflict. There's no question and that might be a good thing. Because I like the optics on our side, the political optics of Biden sending Border Patrol down or whatever, to stop the Texas guard and all the other guards who have been beginning to come to our aid in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, you name it, they're coming to hell,
Bill Peacock maybe even New York and Illinois, we'll send some down here.
Don Huffines That would be fun. But this is a serious situation. And it takes courage to face no weakness.
Bill Peacock Yeah. Alright, let's move over to the last issue, education, freedom, big issue for the foundation. What what is education? Freedom? Maybe not everybody will understand what that is. What What are you talking about when you use that term?
Don Huffines The money that the state of Texas depends on educating children could follow the child. We're here to do? What's the fundamental issue of government education? It should be what's best for the student? How do we how do we please the student and parents of students? How do we best educate them? That's what it's about. It's about education, freedom, and what we can do for them and not what we can do in the district with the superintendent or teachers not interested in that. I'm invested in educating that time.
Bill Peacock A lot of people within this system, teacher unions and school administrators, unions, and those types of things, say that the goal here is to define public education. Right. And but it seems to me what you're saying is, you're not so interested in the funding for public education as you just are in the education for the children.
Don Huffines I'm interested in the best possible education for every student in the state of Texas. That's going to government school, great. And they think that if that's their choice, the choice of their parents, or the student, that's what they want. Fantastic. And that's, by the way, is what most of them are gonna pick because that's where all their friends go. And that's where the sports teams are gonna play football or whatever. But there's a lot of kids, particularly kids with learning disabilities, and physical disabilities, they're not being served. There's a lot of kids who've gone to schools that are horrible. And there's districts that are horrible. They remember that the measuring stick that we have for our government schools might not be the best measurement standard because it's been dumbed down so much over the years. But it really has, so let's break it. I love the free market. I love capitalist. And there's nothing better than having competition. Competition is always say lowers the price and increases the quality of everything. Of course, it's going to make all the government schools better, because they're only going to compete for the student. They got it that's stupid doesn't like the system or the school they're in and a lot of leaving. But that principal has superintendent
Bill Peacock to learn how to compete and a lot of people have said that, oh, school choice doesn't work. Kids don't get better when they leave and go to private schools or charter schools or whatever it is. I say they're wrong on that, that there's a lot of evidence out there. But seems to me you're saying that that's important. But maybe even more important, is the liberty of the parents and the students to choose what they think is best for them.
Don Huffines Amen. Absolutely. That is just looking at it from 30,000 feet, the government tells you you have to go to school, the government tells you where to go to school. The government takes the curriculum, the government pays the faculty. And it's like, whoa, wait a minute, what happened to the liberty? You know, is we know when our some of our research, I think it was in 2015, that 85% of the students were not, did not go to Texas, it's a lot of numbers. But it was that was the case they were people went together with homeschoolers are found on different school houses, everybody pitched in a lot of money. And that was what it was in United States for 200 years from 1630, all the way up until the Marxist really decided on the Frankfurt Institute, and the whole business about Marxism, and it came over from England, and we made it public. They called it and we're here in the United States is what they call it, and everybody needs to be the same. Everybody needs the same education. And that's just not the case. It really destroys liberty, of education, freedom of choice.
Bill Peacock One last thing, it's, and I didn't mention this during my introduction of you, but but you're a Christian. I was just wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about how your faith has motivated you and influenced your perspective on public policy?
Don Huffines Well, thanks for asking that. It is fundamental to, to my public policy and to my life. And that's why our tagline for the foundation of liberty foundation is Liberty, prosperity and virtue, virtue center, you, as our founders of our country knew that she really never experienced Liberty fully eligible for virtuous society. And that comes with a God of fairness society, it really does. And so I'm a firm believer in Jesus and our Christian faith. And I'm also a firm believer in evolution, and demons, and Satan. I think this is that our political environment really reflects our spiritual environment. That many things that we deal with every day in the political space is just combating painful people's real segments through and he's going to use button berry when he won't be working in northern India. That's the political and when he takes away your liberty, and he can control thereby the whole world and one country or whatever, well, one ruler or group or rulers, and he can destroy humanity, he can destroy men. That's what his goal is. It's a lot harder to destroy men, and they all have thinkers.
Bill Peacock Yeah, I teach, as you know, teach 12th grade government and economics. And one of the things that we talk about in there is how Augustine many many 1500 plus years ago, identified this, this big problem out of Scripture, that of original sin. And whenever he you know, so man is corrupted. And whenever you put a lot of people together one place and start concentrating power as if in government, for instance, you're gonna have problems. And so one of the things I think that school choice reflects along with a lot of other things like the you know, the decentralization of power and the separation of power at the federal level, federalisation stuff like that, seems like school choice takes those kinds of things into account and lets people send their children where they think is best. So not everybody's in control of the edge. One group of people are in charge of the education of our children.
Don Huffines Really everything, not just education, but you're right. I mean, education is fundamental. Now we've got our government schools, when they took Jesus out and got out in general, in 6162. We've got generations now of Texans growing up that don't have any foundation, a very little foundation of morals and principles, and we're seeing that we're reaping that harvest.
Bill Peacock Well, Don, I really appreciate you being on This week's Liberty Cafe cafe, that fascinating discussion. Thank you.
Don Huffines Thank you, Bill. Look forward to doing it again.
Bill Peacock And also thank you to our sponsors here at the Liberty cafe, Texas scorecard. So again, run over to Texas scorecard.com. And you can also go over to Hofheinz. Liberty on how finds liberty.com and find out what needs to be done here in Texas on property, property taxes and school choice, and whatever else we need to do to further Liberty here in Texas.
We all have to depend on someone. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we discuss how the progressive left is turning our dependence away from God to a god-like government.
Tanscribed by Otter.ai:
Welcome to Liberty cafe, where oppression is on the menu. Stacey Abrams, the race baiting progressive gubernatorial candidate in Georgia says she wants more Georgians with disabilities to be able to live independently. It doesn't take a lot of effort to figure out that what she really wants is a larger, more intrusive government that can be used to destroy what's left in America of the Christian perspective on government, and family. We're gonna be talking about this on this week's episode on episode 101 of the Liberty cafe. Hi, this is Bill Peacock, I'm really blessed to have you here with me today, on the Liberty cafe. It's always a blessing to be a part of your network of where you get information from, and to be part of the Texas scorecard network to be sponsored by them, and all the great things they're doing to fight for liberty, here in Texas. So please go over to Texas scorecard.com. And listen to them. We've got great other great podcasts over there are lots of great articles and reporting. It's It's the place to go if you want to find out really, who's oppressing you in government today in the path out of oppression. So go on over there and find out more. So I recently ran across this article about Stacey Abrams focus on disability in in a news outlet called the 19th, which is an online news site which identifies as an independent nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy. I first became aware of the 19th because its CEO and co founder, used to be the editor in chief at the Texas Tribune, which is another online left wing rag that covers Texas politics from Austin. Now, don't get me wrong, I disagree with just about everything that the Texas Tribune and the 19th Publish. But I found both to be really good sources. For keeping up with the agenda, the progressive left, we have to stay on top of what they're saying, to be able to plan where we're going and help address all the the attacks of the left and progressive culture on Christianity. And just conservatism, I guess. But But I will say that the 19th seems to be particularly good man actually much better than the Texas Tribune at doing what it's doing it, it's got some good reporting. And it's also really good at pushing its progressive agenda, which is focusing at the 19th, particularly on feminism and homosexuality. So the article about Abrams was written by the 19th caregiving reporter. Now, just having a caregiving reporter tells us something about the progressive agenda. With reporting focused on the lack of government supplied caregiving, we see that caregiving is only seen as compassionate when it is supplied by the government. And this bias shows up clearly. In the first paragraph of Abraham story. Let me read that for you. Martha, hey, thorn, 22 has Down Syndrome and gets help from her mother with everyday tasks like grocery shopping, meal planning and getting around the Georgia Institute of Technology students would love to be living independently. But she's been on a on a waitlist to receive in home support services from the state of Georgia for six years, with no end in sight. So that straight, that short paragraph seems very straightforward. And not much to it really. But we can actually learn an awful lot about the progressive agenda, the anti Christian anti God agenda, the progressive left, if we approach this short little paragraph from a both a biblical and a common sense perspective, well, I guess those are actually the same. So let's do that. And we'll start out from what we might think of as common sense, and then we'll move into the biblical perspective from there. So the problem described here in this article, is that because Martha doesn't have these home and community based services, she can't live independently, because she has to depend on her mother. So I looked up some of these services and to find out what they are. And they include, here's just a paragraph describing it. The staff will assist in acquiring retaining and improving skills such as bathing, dressing, chores, walking or moving around and planning or cooking meals. We will even help find ways to get you where you need to go and help you get involved with things you like such as recreational activities, access to food, making your own schedules and having visitors. Furthermore, it says staff can assist in acquiring and retaining and improving skills such as socialization, communication, shopping, and other skills you will help you be successful at home and in the community. You will have access to food and can learn how to cook transportation is available. So So do you see the problem here? The complaint is that Martha can't live independently because she has to get help from her mother with everyday tasks, like grocery shopping, meal planning and getting around. So how is it that the 19th proposes that we move Martha to independence? Well, by giving her help from the government, somehow, when the government is bathing and dressing her, when the government is cooking Martha's meals when the government is helping her find recreational activities, and the government is providing transportation from her instead of her mother doing these things, a life of dependence is magically transformed into independent living. Now, this would just boggle the mind, if we weren't already used to the language of the left, such as when they call violent riot riots, mostly peaceful protest, when they call actual, mostly peaceful protest insurrections, and then being told that when we're being oppressed by government that is actually protecting our rights. But of course, this is the language of oppression we hear from the government today. The path to liberty and independence, they tell us is reliance on the government. So now, let's look at the second aspect of this. Now, I don't know Martha, I've never met her. But we do know that she is 22 years old and has Down syndrome. This is obviously a hard situation. I don't wish it on anyone. And I'm certainly not an expert on this. Yet. Given what I do know about Down syndrome. One is, is going to have to think that Martha is going to continue to need some kind of help, that there's no path to to the independent living for her, in the sense that many people are able to experience it's just going to be different from her. For whatever reason, God brought her into this world without a lot of the capabilities or with diminished capabilities compared to other people, she's going to need some help. So what that tells us is not only are the people here at the 19th, and people are promoting Medicaid and other kinds of welfare, it's not only are they lying about what Independent Living knows that it's independent living if the government is helping you. But they're also lying about the kind of independent living. That is a realistic goal for Martha. So let's take all this and then put it in the context of from a biblical perspective. As we go on into the article, we see that Martha talks about having to rely on her mother as really painful. Then she goes on to say, I want to be out in the community, we need to change this, her not being able to get these government programs. So people with disabilities can have social lives and lives worth living. So let's just understand this clearly having to rely on her mother is painful. But somehow Martha thinks that relying on the government becomes a life worth living. We can see some of the problems with that. But we can also see the same kind of perspective, unfortunately for Martha's mother, because Martha, Martha's mother points out that the the main reason that she can't get these home and community based services is because the simple fact that she has two healthy parents and then the The 19 comes along and tells us that like many family caregivers, her mother provides the other paid under supported care necessary for a daughter to thrive. So there's a problem here. It's that these people see, government is the solution to the problem. And the problem being that Martha has to rely on her family that she has to rely on help from her mother. And from her father, the mother provides us unpaid help while the father is out working. So here we see very clearly even from within Martha's family, the less ongoing efforts to scorch the traditional family. It's as if having Martha's mother helping her is a reminder of how God designed the world to work with a father and a mother, raising up children and the discipline instruction, Lord. And we certainly can't have that. Why? Well, it's pretty simple. Because if if children are dependent on their parents, those children might actually learn to depend on someone other than the government. And if the parents are Christian, they might actually learn to depend on Jesus Christ, calling on Him as their Lord, again, instead of the government, which is, of course anathema to the left. The ultimate goal of the left is to remove God from the public square, and from everybody else's lives, because the simple reason they hate God, they are rebelling against Him. As we all have, in the fall, we all became in rebellion against God. And by the grace of Jesus Christ, some of us have come back into relation with God, part of his family. But until that happens, the nations are rebelling against Him. In fact, in Psalm two, we see how the nations and the peoples are raging against God. And so what happens is that governments today are trying to become like God, just like Adam and Eve, trying to became like God, just like the people of Babel, trying to replace God by going to an occupying their place in the heavens. And, and they will do anything to distort the every good thing that God has given us, like families, just to make this happen. So let's think a minute about the biblical design for how God made the world to work, particularly when it comes to government. So to help us depend on Him, God gave us self governance or self control. So as we are able to govern ourselves, and listen to what God tells us to in the Bible, and obey Him, we exhibit dependence on God. But he just didn't leave it to ourselves, he gives us gave us three forms of external government to help us depend on Him, to turn to him to call on Him as Lord and Savior. And those three external forms of government, our family, government, church, government, and civil government. And each one of those operates in a different sphere, helping us turn toward God and rely on him. So in this case, we have the two ones in focus here are family, government and church government. The family government and God's organization of the world in our lives, is the primary caregiver. So if we had a caregiving reporter, who was really doing her job, she would be writing on how the family should be caring for the for each other and be writing an article here in this case, in Martha's case, rejoicing and how Martha's mother and father are helping take care of her without help from the government. But of course, that's not what we see going on here. But we might think of this family, the family government is the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Well, of course, we don't see that today. Those things have been taken over by the government, largely in many, many situations. But God also designed the role of the government not to be the Health Department of Health, Education and Welfare. But the Department of I don't know, justice, I think is a good way to describe it. And we can use the words of the Declaration of Independence to help describe this to its that government is instituted among men to secure our God given inalienable rights of life, liberty and property. So the government's here to put Protect us by securing our rights so that we might live and walk in liberty, the liberty to worship, and praise God. But what's going on here with Martha and her mother and the 19th, and Medicaid home and community based services is that they are all attempting to have the government, civil government taken over the role of the family and the family government. And ultimately, of course, the goal here, even if they don't know it, or don't proclaim it out loud, is to have the government take over the role of God with all caregiving coming from the government. Because we're all caregiving comes from all authority resides as well. So what is right or wrong? We can just ask the government. What rights do we have? No, just ask the government is requiring a photo ID to vote about voter integrity or voter suppression, just ask the government can a boy become a girl, just as the government we don't have to look to see and ask God the saints, we don't have to look to see his plan for creation, we don't have to look and see how he created us, male and female, He created us, we can just ask the government. I'm sure you get the picture here. Unfortunately, though, millions of Christians across our country today still don't get this. They see things that require dependence on government, like public schools, welfare, economic development programs and other efforts to assume roles that God gave to families and churches is good. Well, there is a way out of this stuff. We must worship God weekly in our churches, the way he tells us to worship Him in Scripture. And then we must also pray to him that he would open our eyes to the goodness of depending on him and the goodness of his design for how the world should work. And then finally, we must bring to the to the world to the nations, the whole council, of the Word of God, so that as we debate these things in public, we will have his word and his knowledge and his wisdom on opening the eyes of ourselves and for everybody else in the world, on the necessity of depending on God and submitting to his design for the various roles and family, church, and civil governments. Well, thanks for joining me today on the Liberty cafe, as it always is a blessing to have you here with me. And thanks also to our sponsor, Texas scorecard. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next time
The rise of oppression in our culture is obvious to us all. On the 100th episode of the Liberty Cafe, we discuss the true source of oppression and consider how we as individuals and a nation can turn away from oppression on our march toward liberty.
Transcribed by Otter.ai:
Welcome to Liberty cafe, where oppression is on the menu. As you just heard, the tagline of liberty Cafe is where oppression is on the menu. I've been working in Texas government in and around Texas government. I've been studying theology, and been teaching government and economics for quite some time now. And one of the things that has been very evident to me, and I'm sure to all of you as well, during the last few years, but even before that is that oppression is all around us. And particularly the oppression that we see in government, the civil government, the federal government, the state government, the local government. And so I thought on this the 100th episode of liberty Cafe, and explain a little bit about oppression, what it means, and particularly what it looks like in government, and how our government was designed to avoid it. And wait a little bit about why that's not working that way now. So, welcome to the Liberty cafe. I'm Bill peacock. This is the 100th episode. I'm very excited about that. And I'm glad that you're with me today on that, blessed to have you here and also blessed to have Texas scorecard as our sponsor. What does it mean then? oppression? Well, of course, if we look at the Bible, the first place it points to oppression is the oppression of our sinful nature, right? We are slaves to sin when we're born. And we are oppressed by arson. Right? The devil introduced that into the world. Well through that was introduced in the world from the devil through even then into Adam. And from that time all, we have been oppressed by our own sinfulness. But then Jesus Christ came, and to the world, to rescue us from our oppression, to save us from the oppression, but not just from our oppression, of course, but from the wrath of God. Who, because of our sin, was going to carry out the punishment that he told us about in the Garden of Eden, that death was a result of disobeying God, eating of the fruit, of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So since that time, we've had to deal with this. But thanks be to God, Jesus Christ is here. And for those of us who come to faith, through His grace, through the knowledge of Jesus Christ and calling Him as Lord and Savior, we can be free from that eternal oppression. Unfortunately, we still live in a world where there is sin, and we still have sin within ourselves, we're not fully perfect and complete, lacking nothing good. Until we get to the new heavens and the new earth when they are completed and Christ has returned. Yet we have to deal with oppression today. So the first thing, of course, we have to do is repent of our own sense, because if we don't do that, nothing around us is going to get better if Christians aren't walking in repentance, the world isn't going to see what repentance look like, and the gospel is not going to be as attractive to them. And it's likely that they don't come to Christ like they should. So I want to put that as the backdrop for all this because I can talk about government oppression, but we can't get rid of government oppression until we start repenting of our sins through faith in Jesus Christ. All right, so that's the backdrop for oppression and how we have to deal with it. But what I like to do here on the Liberty cafe, particularly is, from that backdrop, point to what oppression looks like in our daily live. And we see all around us from you know, there are criminals who are process, you know, they break into our homes, they steal our cars, some people might be murdered, because of the oppression from those around us. But I think the main role, the main place we see oppression coming from in the world today is from government. And it used to be that we could look to governments across the world, or maybe just down into Mexico and South America but certainly around the world. We look at Sub Saharan Africa, we look at the the Islamic countries, we look at Southeast Asia. Asia and China and Russia, older into into Nazi Germany, places like that. But, unfortunately, oppression is on the rise in the United States. And I'd suggest that the reason for that is that people have turned away from the acknowledgement as Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. And as people started turning away from that, they have sought something else as Lord and Savior. So you have conservatives who aren't Christians who kind of turn to the free market. And libertarians, if we just had free markets, everybody would be in great shape. But of course, that's not the case, because we're still senators. But unfortunately, for the most part, what we see people turning to is government. Even folks who necessarily aren't liberal, progressive, turned to government for a lot of things, but the liberals and progressive have turned to government as the new god. And of course, if the government is the new God, then what we have, then is, the government has all powers because there's nobody above it. And thus, the government can do to us what they want. So that this was the issue that was going on, back in the years up to the founding of our country. If you go back to the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, that area, a little bit before that, and after it, what we saw was a renewal of the understanding that God was the governor of all things that Jesus Christ was the Lord and King of all things. All authority, it tells us in Matthew 28, had been given to Jesus Christ, and he rolled over all kingdoms, and all kings, and he would rule over all these kings and kingdoms until his last enemy death was defeated. In the meantime, he'd be putting his other enemies under His feet. And one of the key issues here, with all that was this concept of covenant, God created us, he made all things he made the world, and he put us in it, to go out and do His will to be fruitful, and multiply, to fill the earth, and to subdue it and have dominion over that. And he made a covenant with us to do that, if we would go do this, as he called us to do, then he would watch over us and guard us and protect us, and bring us to success in these things. So of course, we failed in that miserably. But Jesus Christ again, came along, and has brought that task back to the realm of possibility. And so that's what Christians are all mankind, in one sense, today, are still in the Dominion business. But Christians in particular, are in the business of exercising dominion over the world, in covenant with God, and doing it to please Him. And so that was the concept of civil government, that the Reformers came up with that man was in covenant with God. And we saw this first, for instance, in the Mayflower Compact, which was probably the first document drafted government drafted for America when the Pilgrims came over. And it was done here on the on the ship over and applied here. And it starts with the name of God, it says in the name of God, that's where the Mayflower Compact starts. What happened though, in the 100, or so years, leading up to the American Revolution, is that secularism started to rear its ugly head in the world, through the through the what was known as the enlightenment. Of course, it was called the enlightenment because the people who were pushing the enlightenment, were thinking that Christianity was part of the darkness. And so they needed to shine light into the world, into the darkness of Christianity. Of course, we all know that the opposite is true, but that didn't stop them. And there were thinkers like Hobbes, and Locke, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Rousseau, who came up with the concepts of social contract theory in what that did, was replaced essentially, God with man, and God with government. So there was no longer this covenant between man and God. And then the rulers also were in covenant with God because they were, as we see in Romans 13, they were put into do their jobs as rulers to protect God's people and to carry out God's will. But with the idea of social contract theory, then government just became a contract a social contract between the citizens and the sovereign over them, whether that was a king. In the case of Hobbes, he would have suggested that the king had absolute authority over the citizens once they had entered into this contract. Or with Locke, he still was probably not a believer, but still acknowledged God up there as a creator, and and recognized him as the some ways ultimate authority, but he still put this contract between man and the governed. He did believe we had inalienable rights. But he wasn't quite exactly clear how they got here in a lot of ways. And so we come to the situation where we get to the Declaration of Independence. And Thomas Jefferson, who was also not a believer, clearly has a scriptural perspective on things a biblical perspective when he says that God created all men, and that he put in men in certain unalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Lockwood have said, life, liberty and property. And then, and this is where we get to the crux of the matter in a lot of ways that Jefferson said, and this is absolutely correct, still, that. He said that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. So according to Jefferson, in the declaration, but also think also in the Bible, we have the situation where God gave us inalienable rights, and they were being abused by certain people. And then therefore, government was formed. And it was formed by God, civil government was formed to one of three different forms of government that God gave us civil government, family, government and church government, and along with self government, which would be self control. And so God gave us the civil government to secure our rights. Unfortunately, Hobbes and Locke and then later Rousseau mess this up. Because they came along with this rationale that said, That man is free, they both use a state of nature and said that man is free in the state of nature. And Locke actually pointed back to the, to the Garden of Eden Mises said, they're free in the state of nature, to do whatever they want to do, including protect themselves against others, and that includes killing and enslaving others if that was what was in their best interest. But of course, man has never been free to do what man wants to do, because we're the creature creature, and God is a creator. So we've always been subject to him, just like Adam and Eve were when they were told not to eat the tree of the knowledge, of good and evil. So because of this view, of the state of nature, Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau said that man had to give up some of its rights, some of our rights, the right to do anything, and give up some rights in order to secure the protection of government. But that is wrong because of this premise. That that we just talked about, that man was free in the state of nature to do anything, but we know that's not the case. So instead, when governments are instituted among men, it was to secure all their rights. We don't have to give up any rights as people and as citizens, when we come under a government, in fact, our rights are be to be protected and enhanced, they're not given to us because we already have them they're inalienable, but they are to be enhanced and protected by the government. Unfortunately, this view of have inalienable rights and that we need to be protected. They need to be protected rather than given to us or that we have to is not out there and it's not seen Today rather, it's more of this hopsie In lexington view locking in view that we have to give up some rights in order to be secure the blessings of government protection. And so that's why we see all around us today. That in the legislatures and the courts, we have all these tests, particularly in court decisions and court rationale and reasonings and, and decisions that they do like a rational basis test. It's okay, if the government takes away a right over here from us if it's in the public interest for everybody. And that's straight out of Hobbes and Locke, right? It's okay to take some rights away from this group of people as long as you don't take away too much of them, because it's in everybody else's best interest. But that's not the way the Bible works. That's not the way the Bible talks about these things. That's not even the way the Declaration of Independence talks about these things. And in fact, if you look at how the Constitution was set up originally, that's not even how the Constitution was set up. Now, unfortunately, by the time we get to the Constitution, it's more much more of a social contract theory than a covenant document, it's still Christian roots, and those who would say that the founding of our country was not Christian or just absolutely wrong. But we have in the Constitution, there's only one mention of God directly. And that's in the date, in the year of our Lord, was that 1788, I think, when it was signed, and so it has a social contract theory, but still, the structure of it recognized. And this is where we'll get back to oppression, that oppression was inherent in government, and that people who joined together to form a government would inevitably seek to use that government to further their power, and they would be become corrupted by it. And so. So there's a couple of questions I'd like to read here from Pastor Douglas Wilson, he wrote a document called the Liberty catechism. And it helps explain what our government should look like from a biblical perspective and how we would deal with the oppression that comes from government and how our founders actually tried to deal with that. And let me read question 19 to you, how should we guard against this kind of abuse in the civil realm? The answer, we must adopt a constitutional order based on two sources, first, from the scriptures, as God's special revelation to us, second from natural revelation, how God created the natural world, together with our consciences, then instinctly recognize how he made the world. So if we want to deal with oppression and government, the first thing we have to do is look to God, His Word, Jesus Christ, when He tells us about how government should be organized, how we should act within our government, how we should repent of our sins, and then also to natural revelation, because the Bible said that is written every man's heart and then just looking around the world around us, but that there is a God, and that there are right or wrongs, all that needs to be put into the foundations of government. Second, he asked her, the 20th question is, what are the basic limitations that should be placed on civil government? The answer is there. They are the limitations of Scripture against absolutism, including constitutional limitations of enumerated powers, the separation of powers between the legislative, judicial and executive, and the hierarchy of powers and federalism. So if that language sounds familiar, it should, because that is the language of the founders of our country who set up our constitution with all those things in place. Unfortunately, they also put some provisions in the Constitution that allowed those to erode over time. And, of course, just the sinful nature of our society, and particularly our legislative leaders and our executive leaders and our judges have just turned the rest of the Constitution upside down, reading into things reading into it, things that aren't there, and ignoring things that are there. So, the bottom line here is, if we are going to deal with oppression in this world, we need to deal with it, first and foremost, by looking to God to Jesus Christ. And how he came to set us free from all of our sins. This is the Only way to overcome oppression in the world is through Jesus Christ. And so just to close this week, I'd like to read two things. First, I'd like to read just a short passage from the Declaration of Independence, talking about rights. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with us with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, very clear exposition of biblical truths in there. We need to turn to this biblical truth and turn away from the social contract theory in the state of nature of Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau who who've led us down a rabbit hole into oppression. But even more than that, if we're turning away from Hobbes and Locke, and Rousseau, we need to turn to something and as I mentioned, that is Jesus Christ. And so let me just finish by reading this quick passage from Luke and this is when Jesus began His ministry, he went to Nazareth, where he was born. And he went into the synagogue, as was his custom, on a Sabbath day. And then he, when he was in there, he picked up the scroll. That was the reading of the day, it was from the prophet Isaiah, that was given to him. And then as it says, Here, he unrolled the scroll and found the place where he's written, and this is what he read. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovering those sight of the blind, to set at liberty, those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. So there isn't a nutshell, folks. So when Jesus Christ finished reading that passage, he sat down, he said it down and then told to the people here in your site, this passage has been fulfilled, because that was a passage proclaiming the coming of the Savior of the world, not just the savior of the Jews, but the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ. And the Jews had been waiting for it for 1000s of years, the world had been waiting for it for 1000s of years, ever since the fall in the Garden of Eden, and finally, after 4000 or so plus years, the promise of God had been fulfilled the promise of God to to relieve us to protect us to to guard us from oppression and take away all oppression from US has come. In that passage, I think it's one of the most amazing passages of Scripture. And so I would just encourage all of us today, first of all, to look to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, to repent of our sins, and eliminate that oppression from us as much as we can in a fallen world. And then take that idea of Jesus Christ as Lord and keen, and take that to everything we do. In the public policy world. If we're passing laws, we ought to be thinking and talking about Jesus Christ, if we're making court decisions, we ought to be thinking, and quoting Jesus Christ and all of His Word. If we're discussing a school board meeting down the street, we ought to be looking and talking about that in the context of God's word, and Jesus Christ because that, my friends, is the only way for us to truly overcome oppression in this world. Well, thank you for once again coming and listening to the Liberty cafe, especially coming to the 100th episode of the Liberty cafe. Been a blessing. And thanks once again also to our sponsors of the Liberty cafe, Texas scorecard. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next time.
The culture is raging against God and His people. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we examine one form of this attack on God and the church: Side B Homosexuality and gay pastors.
Transcribed by Otter.ai:
Welcome to Liberty cafe, where pressure is on the menu. It's not difficult to see with a brief glance around us that God is a creator of all things, yet the nations are raging. And they're doing their very best to deny that God is the Creator because like it says in Psalm two, they want to cut the cords with God, they want to remove the shackles that they feel like God has put them under. They want to rule without God, and God's interference in what they're doing. And so they've gone on the attack, and they're attacking the concept of God as a creator. Well, we're going to talk about that, particularly as it relates to homosexuality today, and how it relates to the culture around us. In this week's episode of the Liberty cafe. Hi, my name is Bill peacock. And this is episode 99 of the Liberty cafe 99. That sounds really great. Even better, though, is Episode 100, which we'll be getting to just next week. So it's a blessing to have you here for episode 99 of liberty cafe. Hope you can join us next week for episode 100. And it's also a blessing to be sponsored by Texas scorecard, the great folks over there who are fighting for our liberty here in Texas, and really around the world every single day. So head over to Texas scorecard.com and find out what they're doing and what you can do to join the fight for liberty. Well, it may sound a little strange, the topic I'm going to talk about today. So, but let me just lay it out for you. So I tend to church in the Presbyterian Church of America, that's our denomination. So the PCA is one of the more conservative or evangelical or Biblically sound denominations in the United States. But it's got a challenges over the last 25 years. The woks progressive movement has been making inroads even into the PCA like it has many other denominations over the years. And these inroads have been made on biblical doctrines, such as those related to the days of creation, race egalitarianism that's been going on for a while. But of course, the fight of the day, really is over. Two things, it's over abortion, and it's over homosexuality. And, and so we're going to focus in on today on homosexuality, because as far as we know, and the culture the canceled culture today, that Christians who speak out against some of the things that are going on in the culture today, whether it's drag shows family friendly drag shows, or gay marriage or anything else, are often attacked, sometimes physically, more often through verbal attacks or being canceled in their jobs or their work or those kinds of things in the culture. And so it's really important for us to have a clear picture of the perspective, the biblical perspective on homosexuality, heterosexuality, those kinds of things. So what's been going on in, in my denomination is there's been a lot of debate over what is known as side B, homosexuality, or otherwise known as being a gay celibate Christian. And the concept is, it's okay to be a gay Christian, as long as you're celibate. Now, let me just be very clear upfront that I welcome. All same sex attracted men and women, to church, let them come in, including those who are attempting to remain celibate. And I do so because they just like me, need to repent of their sin. And if they're not in church, if we don't let them in church, if they don't, aren't drawn into the church in some way, then they are unlikely to hear the truth that both same sex sex and same sex attraction are unholy and sinful in God's eyes, and something of which they need to repent. So so that's the big debate going on in our church right now. And I thought it'd be instructive to the folks who are listening to the Liberty cafe to hear a little bit about this. It's a little inside baseball. But on the other hand, I think the ramifications are, have clear, or repercussions and ramifications outside the church. Because if the church is getting these things wrong, so is everybody else gonna get to me because the church is responsible for taking the Word of God to the people making disciples of the nations as Matt is. Jesus told his disciples Apostles in Matthew 28 So what's going on now is that every year we have in the PCA, a general assembly, and they pass what what are known as overtures. And this past summer, there were a number of overtures reading relating to this. Gay Christianity, overtures, 815, and 29. Numbers don't mean a whole lot. But overture 15 talked about the problem we're having in the PCA, specifically about whether a gay Christian, somebody who describes himself as a gay Christian identifies as a gay Christian. So who is celibate, right? So some denominations have said, it's okay to be a practicing homosexual. We haven't gotten that far yet. And hopefully never do in the PCA. But in this case, there are and I think you can be a Christian and be struggling with same sex attraction, you know, and it's just like, you can be a Christian and be struggling with adultery, either in your eyes or in actions. And if you do these things, you can repent, and you still continue to walk. And being a Christian. So there's not a problem there. The problem is whether or not a gay celibate Christian, so to speak, or somebody who's identifies in that way says they're gay, and that they're celibate can be a pastor in the PCA. So I think this is totally wrong. Because what that says that, basically, if you identify as a gay Christian, you're saying, ultimately, that having these kinds of attractions to men or women, depending on which way you're going there, there's nothing sinful about them, as long as you don't act on them. And that's simply not the case. Jesus talks about this a lot. Maybe not specifically about the gayness, but you know, for instance, lust, murder, right? If you're angry at somebody in your heart, you're murdering them. You're guilty of murder. If you're lusting for, in my case, a woman in my heart, I'm guilty of adultery, right. And so the same thing would be if somebody is having sexual attractions for somebody of their own sex, that's sinful, we need to they need to repent. And, again, that's all right, if they're working on it, and desire to repent, but that really doesn't mean that if they're describing themselves that way, and saying it's okay that they don't need to repent, then they shouldn't be a pastor in our church or any other church. So this was a narrowly contested vote at our general assembly this past year. They approved it by only 51% was a 50 vote margin 1094 to 1044. But that's not enough to put this into the Constitution, if you will, we call the book of church order, which is one part of our Constitution at the PCA, it now needs to go back to the presbyteries and be approved by two thirds of the presbyteries. Well, a lot of people are predicting that two thirds of the presbyteries aren't going to approve it because of the narrowness of the vote. And I think that's probably the case. I think it's going to be tough to get the things passed. But I think we as Christians, and I'm not an elder in my church, but I think we as laity, or members of the Church, owe an obligation to the church and to our elders to reach out to them and explain what we think about this issue, and why they should be voting for in this case, overture 15. To strictly prohibit. Same people who identify as same sex attracted Gay Christian from being an elder or a pastor in our denomination. So my denomination or my presbytery, based here in Austin is going to be meeting on this on October 29. And they're going to vote on it. So I've already begun the process of reaching out to them and letting them know. And I think that this is important, because of the structure or the PCM. And also because what the Bible tells us, so in our book of church order, it tells us that well, Pete let me put it this way PCA the PCA members elect their elders, it's just like voting for a president or vice president. You can't become an elder in the PCA at a church anyway, there are some callings, but you can't become a pastor or an elder at a church in the PCA unless you're elected by the congregation. vote them up or down. Now, most people We were recommended by the session or by a search committee get elected, but not everybody does. We also wouldn't know we're not congregational though. So we're not like Baptists, you can vote out a pastor. But there are mechanisms in our book of church order, where we can ask a an elder, a teaching elder, or ruling elder to leave where we can make our thoughts known about that. So what that tells me about the relationship between elders and members is that members have a responsibility to make informed decisions. They need to educate themselves on this issue, just like voters, and the voters, I'm talking to today, whether you're in a PCA church or a Baptist church, and hope you're in a church somewhere. But whether you're in one of those denominations or not, you need to make informed decisions about this issue and other issues when you're electing your officials and let them know what you think. And so that's important to realize. But it's also important to realize that because of our obligation, the shepherds over us, the elders in our church, and the pastors in our churches should be helping inform us on these issues. So they should be reaching out to us, and helping us see what issues are out there. Whether they agree with us or not, or which side they take. It's, I think it's their obligation to help let us know about what's going on. And you can see this in parts of the Bible. For instance, in the book of Exodus, there is a part where the God asked the people three times, if they will affirm the His covenant with them, before it's imposed on them. Now, it's God and he gets to do whatever he wants to do. But yet he reaches out and ask the people if they affirm that, so that's what kind of where the elected part comes from, in our denomination. And I would say, with Baptist as well. But we can also see where God desires input from his people. And input would be prayer, right? God enlighten Luke 18, one through eight, God desires prayer, and he actually responds to it. And you actually go into the book of Exodus, and he changes his mind in response to people's petitions. Another example of that is in the book of Genesis, where God is tells Abraham, he's going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. But he ultimately responds to Abraham who want he says, if you find only five people, or 10, people who are righteous, well, you're not destroyed, and God says, I won't destroy it. Of course, he can't even find those five people. And so he does wind up destroying it, but he God wants to hear from us. I think our rulers ought to desire to hear from us. And if we make a biblical case for something just like Abraham and others have done to God, they ought to change their mind and listen to us. So there's a lot of reasons why the there are people are opposing overture 15 in the PCA. And, first of all, some people believe it's okay to describe themselves as a pastor. And I think that's just wrong. And if you're an elder in our church, and you believe that I don't think you have any more business, being an elder in our church, than the person who's describing himself as, as homosexual. Second, there's also the language of the overture 15 is unclear and contentious. And let me just read this again, one more time for you just in case you missed it the first time. Men who describes themselves as homosexuals, or maybe I didn't say it the first time. But anyway, men who described themselves as homosexuals, even those who described themselves as homosexual and claimed to practice celibacy by refraining from homosexual conduct are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church of America. Very simple, very clear. I think what happens though, is people who disagree with it, don't like it because of its clarity, and they're contending against it because of that. And then finally, there are those who think that it's just not the way to deal with this issue by changing the BCo inserting language about a specific Senate. And I think, at least we can have a discussion about that. But again, I think the people miss the big picture for the little picture, if you will, and can't see the forest for the trees, and don't really realize that we're in a fight, and that we're losing the fight and a lot of ways now, God is sovereign, and God is going to win this battle and win this fight and win this war. In fact, we know that Christ has already completed His work on the cross. The rest is just a mop up operation in some ways, but still, we have to fight the fight that God has put before us. So I think anybody who opposes this is on the wrong side. And I think that if we don't put this into our BCo, then it's going to affect the peace and purity of the church. So why am I talking about this here? Well, just like the lack of clarity, on the gay issue inside the Presbyterian Church of America is harming its peace and purity. I think it's very clear that the lack of clarity on homosexuality is causing a lot of problems with the peace and purity of our culture. And again, I don't want to just make it seem like I'm focused on homosexuality alone. The same thing could be said about divorce, and adultery, and premarital sex, fornication, all those kinds of things. I think it also is true when it comes to the days of creation, and a lot of other issues, racism, very few folks in the general culture and the culture wars out there, and have a clear understanding the biblical perspective on those issues. So I thought I'd just take a minute to lay this out and apply it to the world around us today. Right? We're getting cancelled, for speaking out on these issues, there was a federal district court ruling, I think it was, I think it was a district court, not the appellate court at the Fifth Circuit here in Texas, just this past week, perhaps. And, and a lot of conservatives were celebrating it because it was about the, the LGBTQ issue, you know, the Biden administration, and the courts actually have come out and said, for some time, that you can't discriminate against somebody in your hiring practices because of their LGBTQ orientation or something like this. In this recent court opinion, a federal judge affirmed that, but then came along and changed what some other courts had been doing, by saying that doesn't necessarily give the right of a person to use the bathroom of their choice, according to their chosen gender, or use being guaranteed that they should have people addressing them by their chosen preferred pronouns. So in one sense, that's a really good victory that Elise protects women, particularly from having guys come in, and go to the bathroom with them, or younger women, perhaps, having guys come in and change clothes with them in the locker room, that's a good step in the right direction. It means that, you know, if you hire somebody who is LGBTQ transvestite in this case, then you don't have to call her him. So that's a good step. But the other problem with this is it still affirms the problem that you have to hire somebody, no matter what you think of them. And particularly, you know, if you just extend that into churches, and Christian schools and those kinds of things, that's a problem. I don't know if this ruling goes that far. I know people would like it to go that far. But even just into a regular employer, employers are using their private property, now maybe a big corporation. But that big corporation still has private property, it may be a small mom and pop person where the owner is just one person or a family, it's their private property, they should not be forced to use their property, to hire somebody who they don't want working for them. It's as simple as that. And it's as simple as that, because God made the world and he made world where it was private property because it's his property. And he delegated and gave use of that private property to individuals. And it's not up to the government to tell private people how to use their property. So and this is really a fallout of the Civil Rights Act of 19 was 64, where they were dealing with the problem of racism, but the racism was usually state racism where the states had laws that blacks couldn't eat in cafes, it wasn't that the cafe owners were prohibiting blacks from coming in because it was their idea. Now, it might have been in some instances, but for the most part, it was the government telling the blacks that they couldn't go in there and telling the white people that they couldn't let the black people come in, or else the white people got in trouble. So they passed the Civil Rights Act, but what it did was made it illegal for anybody to Use their property in a way that discriminates against somebody or actually put it put another way, they can't, they have to let anybody into their property, they have to hire whoever they want, as we see now. And it's not just blacks anymore. It's LGBTQ, those kinds of things. That was a egregious violation of property rights. And we can see how this is going farther and farther down the road. And we're going to have pretty soon a situation where our private property, and private property rights are not going to mean anything. Because the government's gonna be able to come tell us to do whatever they want us to do with that, including just take more and more of it away from us, and impoverish us and oppress us. So that is why ultimately, I thought it'd be good to talk about this issue today. Because if we can get some clarity on all these different issues, but in this case, homosexuality, and what is really true and right and good under God's eyes, then the whole culture will start to repent on this and the laws that we have the individuals that are going against this, including we hope individuals who are committing a heterosexual adultery, and we'll have a lot more peace and purity in the culture around us today. Well, thank you for joining me on episode 99 of the Liberty cafe. And once again, thank you to the folks at Texas scorecard for being our sponsor. Thank you for listening to the Liberty cafe with Bill peacock. This show is produced by Texas scorecard. You can learn more about this show and find other shows at Texas scorecard.com. Be sure you subscribe and rate the show on whatever platform you listen on. See you next time
Teacher unions and Texas politicians are damaging, respectively, our schools and electric grid. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we discuss why throwing money at public schools and the electric grid won’t solve the problems with either of them.
Transcribed by Otter.ai
Bill Peacock 0:05 Welcome to Liberty cafe, where pressure is on demand.
teacher unions destroying our public schools, Texas politicians destroying Texas's electricity grid. All this and more on this week's episode 98 of the Liberty cafe. I am Bill peacock. And I'm glad to have you here this week on the Liberty cafe. It's always a blessing to have you with me, as it is a blessing also to be sponsored by Texas scorecard, this great group of men and women over there fighting for our liberty, and theirs. And I encourage you to go to Texas scorecard.com, listen to podcasts, read articles, and even contribute your own content, they would love to have you take part going over there. And also, if you are finding the Liberty Cafe through the Texas scorecard network, run on over to my website. Excellent thought that.net. I write a lot about faith, politics and culture over there, the intersection between all of those, and I hope you might enjoy it. So go on over there to excellent thought.net and see what you can find that you might be interested in. Alright, I want to do something a little bit different today. Just got a couple of news articles that I'd like to talk through just a little bit. And let us see what we can learn from these two articles. Actually, the first one isn't an article at all. It's a tweet from the Texas State Teachers Association, which is affiliated with the National Education Association. So they're all unfortunately, all teacher unions are just not good. They're not for good for our kids. They're not good for budgets, they're not good for liberty, because they have bound together for Well, I can't, I guess the best way to put this is for evil purposes, they don't believe. And that starts with the fact that they don't believe that God should be in the classroom, I would suggest that probably a lot of them don't believe in God at all. But whether they have faith or not, they don't believe that our children in our schools should learn about God. Now we know all the arguments. Why people make that arguments. But if the answer to that is if God is the One True, true God, and He is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all of us in heaven on earth. And He is then everything that we do, including educate our children should teach about him. Now, of course, there are some people in public schools, and you don't believe in Jesus Christ. And they object to that, well, that kind of gets back to the whole point that maybe we shouldn't have public schools in the first place, because it's an impossible job that we have set up in the situation. So in one sense, you can't blame the NEA or any teachers unions for this mess, because it's politicians who have set up our public schools, and gotten us to the place where we have this anti Christian agenda, and all public schools across the nation. But that's not really what I came here today to talk about. I just wanted to talk a little bit about this tweet. So let me just read it to you. This one out on September 30. So just a few days ago from when I'm recording this. It says Greg Abbott is lying about his record on teacher pay. He only focused on public school finance after his slim margin of victory in 2018. Teachers continue to fall behind the rest of the nation and teacher pay and have less power buying power than they had in 2019. Well, the truth of the matter is that maybe probably a lot of what they're saying here is true. I didn't watch the debate between tablet and beta when I'm assuming or should we say Francis O'Rourke, but I'm assuming that's what they're talking about that Abbott was touting his record, about public education. And actually, he's wrong in doing that. Because
you can't pander to these teachers unions, no matter how much money you spend on them. You can't win them over as we've seen here because both Abbott and Dan Patrick and the Texas Legislature legislature have gone on a spending spree over the last two legislative sessions starting in 2019. And then again, 2021, trying to placate These teachers, and the school administrators, and the schools, school boards and all those kinds of things. They're trying to get these folks off their back. And I think if maybe they could spend enough money on these folks, they'll just leave them alone. But as we see, in this tweet, that you just can't do that they're going to keep coming after, after these politician, Republican politicians and coming after them and coming after them, until they can get rid of them. Because what teacher unions and most public school educators, and superintendents and school board members all have in common is a is that they don't have much in common with Republicans, or better yet conservatives and Christians. And so whatever. So called Republican conservative, my offer to them is still on, they were still anathema to the schools. So that's a big lesson to learn from. And we can see that in the fact that what they wrote here is actually true. Because it was after not just Abbott Abbott, margin wasn't too slim. He had probably the biggest margins of all the statewide elections in 2018. You got to remember that's the midterm for the Trump election, Trump in the Trump administration, midterm elections, and it was a wave for the Democrats in a lot of ways. We won't get into why it was away, but it wasn't a lot of places. And they wiped out a bunch of Republican lawmakers and they made in Texas the margins that Republicans had typically earned in elections much more narrow. And Abbott's wasn't so bad, Dan, Patrick's was less. And then Ken Paxton, I think had the very lesson he I think he by by two or three points, something like that. You also have to remember that I think that was one Baito or Francis first ran when he running for the US Senate against Ted Cruz and his margin was was better than than our Attorney General Ken Paxton, but not as good as some of these others. So actually, what happened was that Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick flipped on a lot of the stuff they had been saying about public education, particularly. Dan Patrick had been very pro school choice. He had a year or two before he had been on a panel at Texas Public Policy Foundation, my former employee, employer, and with the lieutenant governor from Nevada, who had they just done some really great stuff on school choice up there. And Dan Patrick was all in and he was still all in heading towards the 2019. Or mostly am heading towards the 2019 legislative session. But all of a sudden, those 2008 18 results came in November 2018. And Patrick flipped overnight comas. And why did he flip? Well, because he was scared. He was scared that Republicans were going to lose power wars. He's a Republican, he wants to maintain power. He, you know, he had his office for the next four years, but he didn't want to lose Republican majorities in the House and Texas senate. So I flipped overnight. Everything that even saying about school choice went out the window. Instead, he came out of the chutes in the 2018 legislative session, pushing for a $5 billion a year, teacher pay raise. That was his big that's how he was going to solve the problem. Not a public education, but a buying off the school districts because he became convinced I believe that if he could placate teachers, and teachers unions and school districts, he could reach into and get suburban moms and keep them from going over to the Democratic side that that's, I'm pretty sure that's where he wound up on all this. So he thought through billions of dollars of your money and my money that teachers teacher pays $5 billion per i think it's per biennium, so two and a half billion dollars per year. And
all our problems would be solid. If all of our problems being solved, meaning that we maintain a Republican majority, I'd suggest a course that we've had Republicans in charge totally in charge of Texas for almost 20 years now. 2003. They've had the house, they've had the Senate, they've had to the Governor and Lieutenant Governor and the Comptroller and every other office, you can think of the Supreme Court. I think we could have done a lot got better over these 20 years than they have with Republicans in charge? I'd much prefer having conservatives in charge. But the basic point here is that it doesn't work. It doesn't solve our problems to throw billions of dollars at teachers unions. First of all, they won't let up on a second of all, the real problem is the government throwing billions of dollars at stuff, and throwing billions of dollars at teachers doesn't solve the problem. It makes it worse, because then somebody else comes along and wants the money and then the Republicans buy them off. Big business wants some money, we buy them off. So the bottom line here is that first of all, I think the bottom line would be, don't pander to our leftist foes, it doesn't help us. Second of all, if we really want to pursue liberty in this state, we have to stop spending money like we are. And that's the other problem that's been going on the last two years is the spinning has gone out of control. They're hiding it with a bunch of the numbers and hope to be able to do something on that soon, but pandering and spending doesn't bring liberty. Alright, the second thing I want to touch on here is an article with the with the new CEO. Per cut. Remember, we have a course we have the Texas electricity grid, and it's all thing collapsed during winter storm Yuri year and a half ago or so something like that. And the CEO, of course, got fired, as did three PUC commissioners. And, and basically the whole ERCOT board are caught manages the grid for the state of Texas. It's a quasi governmental entity. And so they changed everything. And then there's now five PUC commissioners, Public Utility Commission of Texas, commissioners, they've all been reappointed by the bobbin, appointed by Governor Abbott. And then we've got a whole new board for are caught and no longer. It used to be made up of members of the industry, because they were the ones who were managing the industry, they knew the best how to do it. And that doesn't mean they always did it, right. But at least they had the knowledge and expertise. Now we have this board of folks who may or may not know something about electricity, but they're certainly not down in the, in the weeds. They're basically political appointees now running ERCOT that shouldn't make us excited about the future of the Texas electricity grid. And then finally, just recently, we have a new CEO of ERCOT, Pablo Vegas, now, he he's new, he's got a lot of experience, I think in this area. But the thing was, he's a political appointee, too, in part because I don't know all the details. But Greg Abbott, apparently, according to news reports, had to get in and get involved with the hiring of the new CEO when the board workout couldn't make it happen, for whatever reason. So the whole system has been become politicized, which is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. markets work when the buyers and the sellers come together, and decide what market outcomes should be. This is the product we're going to sell. This is the product we're going to buy. This is the price we're going to sell it for this is the price we're going to buy it for. This is the quantity we're going to offer, this is the quantity we're going to buy. All those kinds of things
are worked out best when buyers and sellers expressing their preferences to each other through exchanging money for goods and services. But when you get regulators involved, and politicians and font, all of a sudden you have the the opinions of a few, in this case, maybe a few dozen, or a few 100 regulators replacing the opinions and desires of millions of Texas customers. And that works just as true in the energy market, as it does in the computer market and the automobile market and the insurance market. And the housing market wherever it is. When you have regulators come in, they're basically replacing their opinions and ideas for those in the market itself, and things just aren't going to work out well. So there's this interview, and I think it was a Dallas Morning News with the CEO, Mr. Degas and and I just want to read one quote that was in this and and just comment on it. And let me read the question to them and then I'll come On a recent Dallas Morning News, University of Texas Tyler Tyler poll found that only 14% of Texas have high confidence in the grid stability. Nearly half of Texans are not confident in its reliability. And 20 have zero confidence in the grid. How do you rebuild that trust? And here's his answer. It is a really concerning set of facts to hear that feedback. Because what you want and expect for an electric grid is for people not to really have to think about it, because it's always there. And it's always reliable. And that, frankly, has been the goal of the utilities and electric grid operators. What I think we have to do is get back to that place where Texans don't need to be thinking about this every day, we have to continue to execute in what ERCOT has been doing over the last 12 to 18 months has been executing, they've been improving the way that they operate the grid, so that they never come to a place where they have to ask somebody not to have power. That has been the way you build trust through steady, consistent execution. Well, and I know that this gentleman is very knowledgeable and smart about how to manage electricity grids. But I'd have to say that he's not very knowledgeable about how markets actually work, and how they're supposed to work. He probably knows how they work today in this era of excessive regulation, but but not really the how they should be working in a place where liberty is valued, more than more than anything else. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or property. Now in one one sense, he's right, you know, we as consumers, would like to just most of us would like to just be able to go on and turn on the lights, the lights come on, the AC comes on the refrigerator keeps working. And that's it, then we pay a bill. That is a reasonable, affordable bill. Mainly what we're looking for here is affordability and reliability. Notice that the topic of affordability doesn't come up here in this question, and it doesn't come up anywhere in the interview that he gives. And that's that's a problem. Because really, he says here, what did he say that? That's what he says that what are called has been doing over the last 1218 months has been executing, they've been improving the way that they operate the grid, so that they never have to come to a place where they have to have somebody not to power well. What they've really been doing along those lines, is throwing so much of your money and our money at this problem. They hope that that will start solve the problem. Yeah, I'm sure they've been doing some technical improvements and some systematic systems improvements to this. But really what they've been doing is throwing your money and more money at the problem problem thinking that will fix it. But I guaranteed that making electricity more expensive, won't make the grid more reliable. In fact, like I said earlier,
when you substitute the opinion of a few 100, bureaucrats, dozens or hundreds of bureaucrats for the knowledge and opinions of millions of market participants, consumers, and generators, and transmission operators and those kinds of things, what you have is a tremendous information loss. Now these bureaucrats sit up here and they have all the studies done all those kinds of things. But that's it just gathers a microscopic part of the information about what people want. And people express that through buying and selling in the marketplace. And so what you have automatically, in a heavily heavily regulated system, like we have here in ERCOT, is a less efficient market. And what ERCOT has been doing over the last 18 months as one, as I mentioned, throwing our money at the problem to using that money to more heavily regulate the system. So the system has actually becoming less efficient over the last 18 months and more expensive, a less efficient, more expensive electricity system is going to be less reliable. The reason they're doing this, largely is because As they're throwing all this money at it, and they're banking more regulated, because there's this problem underlying all this, and it's, it's the, the big pink elephant in the room, and it's get this, it's intervention in the market. What are caught in the PUC in the Texas legislature have been doing, really, for the last decade or so is increasing inter government intervention in the market, the primary part of that has been subsidies for renewable energy. Texas has been increasing subsidies for renewable energy. During that time, the federal government has been doing the same thing. And that the thing about renewable energy, when the wind isn't shining, I'm sorry, when the sun isn't shining, and the wind isn't blowing, solar, and wind generation don't work. And that creates all kinds of problems. And yes, you can throw a lot of money at the system. You can put batteries in you can get backup generation heard, you know, last session, Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's company offered to build $8 billion worth of,
of new generation and then sell it to us and make us pay for it? Well, you know, you can do those kinds of things. But it costs a lot of money. And it still doesn't fix the underlying problem, which is the unreliability of wind and solar. So rather than take that on, they're throwing money and regulations at the market. And there's other places they're intervening to, because guess what happens when you have an unreliable market, we're when energy is pushing electricity prices down at the wrong times, which is causing a lack of profits and the generators who would normally be helping us out by building new natural gas generation, which is reliable. What happens will the natural gas generators go broke, they don't build. And then they start clamoring for subsidies. So now are caught is pushing subsidies towards not just renewable generation, but traditional generation as well. And numbers, I've seen that that's going to be about $2 billion this year, which is right on par with the amount of money that renewable generation is getting as well. So all in all between, just say you're gonna stay to Texas, not even including the Federal Government, estimate that over $4 billion of costs have been added to our electricity bills, or property tax bills by regulators at the PUC, the governor, less lieutenant governor, and the Texas Legislature that's just this year alone. It just is getting worse and worse and worse. So you don't rebuild trust through steady consistent execution f. That steady consistent execution is ignoring the underlying problem. And it's in fact exacerbating the problem by intervening more in a market where the problem with the market in the first place was caused by more intervention. All right, well, that's this week's Liberty cafe, Episode 98. I'm really glad that you are with me here today. And I'm also glad to be part of the Texas scorecard network. So go on over to Texas scorecard.com. See what they have offered over there for you and also visit my website. Excellent. plot.net.
Texas’ electric grid is being overwhelmed by unreliable and unaffordable electricity from wind and solar farms. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, I talk with energy expert Robert Bryce about how Texas can get out of the mess our politicians have gotten us into.
TRANSCRIPT:
Bill Peacock 0:17 Not only are Texans facing uncertainty about the reliability of our electric grid, we're also facing much higher costs for the electricity that we buy. In fact, according to a new report, Texas could be on the hook for an additional $10.5 billion
in in costs related to winter storm Yuri, we're going to talk about all that and more on with the author of that report, Robert Bryce, on this week's episode of the Liberty cafe.
Hi, my name is Bill peacock. And thank you for coming and joining us on The Liberty cafe. It's always a blessing to have you here with us. And it's also a blessing to be here because we're sponsored by Texas scorecard. It's a great group of men and women over there fighting for liberty at your local government level, at the state level, and really just across the nation. And so please go over to Texas scorecard.com and see what you can do to join the fight for liberty here in Texas.
So we've all went through here most of us in Texas went through winter storm Yuri, it was a unprecedented event in Texas history and really United States history. I haven't gone through and looked at all the blackouts in the history of the United States. But I've looked at some of them. And really, frankly, I can't find any that are as bad in their totality as the blackouts we faced here in in Texas during winter storm Yuri, certainly the geographic area was probably larger than anything we've ever seen, which in part has something to do with Texas being a very large state. But nonetheless, it was really bad. And there's a lot of reasons why people think we went through that, and we'll talk about some of those on our show today. But why ever that happened and whatever happened, it costs a lot of money. And even why it costs so much money is subject to a lot of debate. But what's not up for debate is that Texans are going to be paying the bill for that for a very long time. We have with us today, Robert Bryce, who's written a recent couple of articles on this topic, and and has dug through all the information so that you and I don't have to and come up with a number that he suggests that we're going to be facing $10.5 billion in costs when it comes to winter storm Yury Texas consumers, Texas electricity, consumers and natural gas consumers if I read his work correctly, you're going to be facing those kinds of bills, and we're gonna be paying out for a long time. So I'm really blessed to have Robert Bryce with us today. Let me just give a little bit of background on him. He's an expert on energy. And he has written a lot about that he's an author. He's a journalist, and he's a public speaker. And he goes about talking about this issue, which is so complex, but yet so central to the wealth and prosperity that we have in their lives. And so it's really valuable to have somebody like Robert, who is breaking down all this information, so that we can better understand how to maintain our wealth and prosperity by having a reliable, affordable electric grid. Among other things. He's the author of a book a question of power, electricity, and the nation's, and the Wealth of Nations. And you can find that book, and a lot more about Robert and his website, Robert bryce.com. So Robert, welcome to the Liberty cafe.
Robert Bryce 3:42 Thanks a lot. Happy to be with you, Bill.
Bill Peacock 3:47 I've been on your I guess you have not a podcast, but you have a video podcast. And I was on that a while back and was was pleased to be there. And so I'm glad that we can have you on on here. But although we're
Robert Bryce 3:58 Glad to be back and Yeah, happy to dive in. I was just before we started, we were talking about this what you pointed out the 10 point 5 billion, and I'm still working through it. Yes. You pointed out I've gone through some of the data. I published some preliminary data in Forbes last month, August 25. I think it was and I just done my own calculations based on published data and I didn't realize there was an inner NRG Energy and put out a report friend of mine that had pointed me to it so anyway, I wrote two pieces in two days, which is something seldom but that I've done in the past. But the yes, you're right. The punch line is about 10 point 5 billion and its consumers in Texas, their consumers in Oklahoma and in Kansas are also facing increased utility costs that will last will will continue for decades in the future because of the damage caused by winter storm Yuri and the unpreparedness of the individual utilities both in power and gas for what happened and the behind the on the enormous costs that they incurred because of the storm. So yes, in Texas alone, it's 10 and a half billion dollars, but you have Bill means more, I think what is it 2.8 billion in Oklahoma and Iowa, Missouri, other states are having somewhat similar but nothing on the order of magnitude, the orders of magnitude we're seeing here in Texas overall.
Bill Peacock 5:12 Well, we all recognize the unprecedented just nature and magnitude of that storm. I've lived in Texas, all my life and never seen anything like that. It was obviously kind of a 100, or maybe one or 200 year storm, that kind of thing.
Robert Bryce 5:29 Except we happen next year, it could happen in three months. Right? Well, right. Yeah. It's not that it can't happen again.
Bill Peacock 5:35 Yeah, exactly. But but so that was part of it. And there were reasons that, you know, we weren't prepared for it, obviously, for whatever reason, but why did it cost me why did the cost get up to $10.5 billion, this electricity, really that expensive that digit over a period of one week or so that we would incur that higher cost?
Robert Bryce 5:59 Right? Well, remember, it's not just electricity. And in the Forbes article that I published on this, it was out August 26. I'm just looking at it. It's called update in our G funded report says Texas ratepayers on hook for 10 point 5 billion due to URI. And Oklahomans face 2.8 billion in debt. It's not just the power utility. So I'm looking at that list now. So you have oh for Atmos Energy and centerpoint, both gas utilities seeking a total of $3 billion, at most, 2 billion and centerpoint. 1 billion, because they had hedged some of their their their forward risk on power, but not necessarily for gas. And then they were short gas when the prices were high. And that didn't have anything to do with their cut. But it does have something to do bill. And you know, you've looked into ERCOT it's the way that the the grid in Texas has evolved to be so dependent on renewables and natural gas and the renewables went away. They weren't available. When the grid was about to collapse, wind and solar went to Cancun with Ted Cruz, they've gone they weren't here.
Bill Peacock 7:02 But as a matter of fact, it's kind of a design, because all this happened at like, one o'clock in the morning. Yes. And it's kind of a design feature that solar is not available at one o'clock in the morning. Right?
Robert Bryce 7:12 Exactly. So they weren't available. And then the grid is on the verge of collapse. And there's not enough natural gas to go around. So there's all you know, all this, this, the the overlap of the electric grid, and the gas grid became obvious. And in the hindsight, no one's talking about the fact that we closed six gigawatts of coal. So we made the electric grid inordinately excessively dependent on one fuel and left us vulnerable, because we didn't have enough baseload generation that had on site fuel. So there was a basic lack overall of the understanding of the need for energy security across both the gas grid and the electric grid. And that that what we see now is the consumers, of course, they always end up paying the bill. Right. But the the key question is, how do we, you know, what's the policy that's going to cure this because the system is still being flooded with weather dependent renewables. And I'll end by just saying, which makes absolutely zero sense if we're facing more extreme weather because of climate change. We don't want our system our most important networks to be dependent on the weather. But yet, that's because of the way that its subsidies are distorting the capacity of the the amount of generation in Texas. That's exactly what's happening. So we face of the grid is becoming more and more fragile. I guess I'll end with that point, Bill. But you and I've talked about this before.
Bill Peacock 8:27 Yeah. So that makes up a really good point. I mean, so we've got these renewables coming in. And and to the state of Texas and large part, it seems, because of these subsidies, now there's subsidies both at the state level and the federal level, and which are part of the part of this whole problem. What What kind of I mean, what kind of magnitude are we talking about when it comes to how much investment there's been in renewables in Texas over the last 20 years or so?
Robert Bryce 8:56 Right. So my, my figures, well, that's actually not my data, it's data directly from the Wind Energy Association, their own numbers put it at about 66 billion? Well, there are numbers about 60 billion total for wind, and then another six years or more than that for solar. But that's not that's only part of the story. And that's the investment that was made in the years before the blackout.
Bill Peacock 9:59 13 property tax abatements. Yeah, right, which are, you know, any almost any kind of business can get those types of payments. You know, the cat in the case of chapter 313, it's a school district said, Hey, come invest in our school district and, and we'll cut your property taxes in half for 10 years basically as what they say. But more and more that is being used to buy renewable energy generators. And I was looking at the data for this. And there are now so this this program is going away at the end of December. And so everybody's piling in to try and get their their cut of this this government money or actually taxpayer money by getting getting their their taxes cut. And there are about 400 projects trying to get under in under the wire 300 of those are wind or solar. And the overwhelming number of those is solar. I know when wind is seeming to take a back seat now to solar when it comes to new generation in Texas. What Why is that going on?
Robert Bryce 11:07 Well, I think it's there's more there has been more clarity on the investment tax credit. I also think that this is simply the evolution of the industry that it's harder and harder to cite wind. And I think the industry is turning more to solar. And I think that in the there's, as I said, a little more clarity in terms of the future of the EITC. Although now that has been made clear with mentioned Schumer. But nevertheless, I just I want to make sure I'm citing your numbers here, Bill because they are yours in about 66 billion was spent on solar and wind in Texas in the years before the blackouts. And they got 21 point 7 billion really 22 billion in state and federal subsidies. And those are that 21.7 Is your number from a report that you published for the for the Energy Alliance. So that's a massive amount of subsidization. And, you know, they call it tax credits, whatever you want to do. But that's what is driving this change in the makeup of the of the ERCOT electric grid, and there is no new thermal generation new gas generation being built in the state five gas fired large gas fired generation instead, it's all wind and solar. And by the end of next year, wind and solar could have more capacity than all natural gas for our generation in the state.
Bill Peacock 12:17 That's a pretty good return on investment. I'd like to get that where I you know, put in you know, $1, you know, $1,000 on something, and I get $333 back before I even worry about the market is going to pay me right
Robert Bryce 12:30 Count me in. Absolutely.
Bill Peacock 12:33 That's good.
Robert Bryce 12:33 I'm opposed to subsidies bill unless I'm getting them. So yeah, go ahead. Amen. That's all I have solar panels on the roof of my house.
Bill Peacock 12:56 It's a pretty nice deal if you can get it. So yes, yeah. Well, let's get back to the cost a little bit. So one of the things that I mean, again, this was a bad storm systems went down, obviously, there's going to be cost to this. But one of the costs that drove it up to this this level of $10 billion. And that's just I think we got to put this in context, right that that $10 billion is just the 10.5 or whatever it's going to be ultimately it's just the debt that we're going to have to pay off. That doesn't account the higher electricity bills that that we had to pay during the storm in after the storm and things like that, right
Robert Bryce 13:37 And that we're paying now. I mean, we've seen dramatic increases in utility prices all across all around the state. I'm here in Austin and Austin did really frankly, just incredibly well during the storm. They made money $54 million, something Austin Energy Did you know, CPS and San Antonio lost a billion dollars, browses electric 1.8 I although it appears they've settled in bankruptcy for something like 1.4. But let me just run through if they don't mind, I'll just hit on a couple of these numbers. So ERCOT itself has requested recovery of around 2.1 billion. And then Brazza Selectric 2.1 roughly and these are directly from the NRG report. Atmos Energy 2 billion Centerpoint 1.1 billion CPS a billion and then some of the others Oh Rayburn country and Rayburn country Electric Co Op has already securitized about $908 million in debt. And they've said that that REIT defeating that or defeating that debt or paying it off will be take something like 27 years so a lot of these bonds that are going to be issued that are implicitly backed by the state they will be paid off over the next 30 years and it will be uneven as I said you know if you don't do an all electric home you won't be paying off debt that was incurred by a gas utility but some of these other things you will be in it depends on on where you are but right now reading this list I'm glad I'm a customer captive customer of a of a monopoly utility Austin Energy
Bill Peacock 14:59 It's the whole system is really confused. We've got competition on the one side for most Texans when they're buying their electricity, but but some of us are still captured by either a Muni in your case, or I used to be, but now I'm out in the hill country. And so I've got whatever cooperative is it is out here that
Robert Bryce 15:22 Peacock you should know your coop, you're an owner there, come on now. One of the living remnants of the New Deal, I'm a big fan of coops. I'm a big fan of publicly owned power and electric and gas utilities.
Bill Peacock 15:37 Well, that's good, except when you're captured, and you can't get it from anywhere else. But anyway, that's it. But so there's
Robert Bryce 17:20 Okay, so but fair enough, but but no electricity, they heard a great quote the other day, and I was talking about it with a friend, apparently from someone who worked at FERC. And I don't know the origin. But natural gas is a commodity electricity is a phenomenon, which I truly did like because it is a phenomenon. And you know, this idea that this system is beating at 60 cycles per second, right in the electrons aren't just bouncing back and forth. I mean, it's truly astonishing, the whole thing, but the network is different. And I'll anyway, we we take more than an hour if we wanted to follow that Bill. So there's a lot.
Bill Peacock 17:51 No, I know that. Well. Here's another thing kind of related to that, in some sense that, that the so this, this $10 billion in the cost of electricity, electricity during that one week was I mean, some people have estimated it up to be close to $30 billion or more, the actual purchased, prices of electricity was purchased during that week. $30 billion, perhaps some, some people say 16, you know, you know, lots of different numbers. I don't think it was 30 because not all of the providers were paying the $9,000 a mega Right. Right. All right. But so But why was the price of electricity at $9,000? Because if you know if I look on my phone today, well, matter of fact, I've got my phone, right here. So if you'll give me just a second, I'll pull up my little ERCOT app, and look at it and the price of electricity. Wholesale price of electricity today in Texas, is averaging about 70 bucks per megawatt hour. Now
Robert Bryce 18:50 Significant increase, because the system is so dependent on gas now and that gas prices have gone up. And because they let the market supposedly take over we have a flood of natural gas and more natural gas dependence than we should have, then that's right. And consumers. And so anyway, that's an issue, because that's a fairly high price. 70 bucks, but it's
Bill Peacock 19:08 yeah, it's a it's a fairly high price. But compared to what was going on that week, it was chicken feed right 1000 Yeah, we're getting the 9000. But when the market was collapsing, or after it had collapsed, the price of electricity was trading at about $2,000 per megawatt hour. The market had come to that. It only went to 9000 when the bureaucrats the commissioners at the Public Utility Commission looked at economic theory and said oh, well, if if the market is in failure, and we have this, this supply of electricity, we can't meet the demand. Obviously prices should be at the market cap which is $9,000. And so they said obviously the market is not working properly, so they arbitrarily raise the price from $2,000 to $9,000 per megawatt hour
Robert Bryce 20:02 That was one of the big human blunders here in real time human blunders, right. I think there were longer term blunders in terms of how the market was set up. And you and I can differ on those issues. But all I agree with you, the fact that they enter the Public Utility Commission, and I don't know why there's a lot of speculation around the governor and who called who and why they did it. But the the notion to raise it to 9000, then leave it there. I mean, it could have been justified if they'd done it for a few hours. But that was the problem. They left it at 9000 for nearly what was it three days or more than three days, whatever it was. And so there was this implied huge costs, which wasn't all that it not all of those, and I've made that mistake, and some of them I math, but that was a big mistake. And it was one that was done by you know, let's call it out. Dan Walker was the chairperson of the PUC, then why did they leave it there was there's we still haven't had a good explanation of why that was done. So I'll agree with you that this tampering with the market and hooting, this price setting was a big failure. And one of the the myriad other things that were contributing to this, as well, including some blame on, you know, weatherization for the gas guys in lalala. You know, all these issues?
Bill Peacock 21:09 Yeah. And I think one of the points I like to make about this is that the problem there was that they refuse to let the market work. Instead, they decided to apply market theory that belongs in academia to a real live operating market, because they're thinking, Oh, if we just boost the price of electricity, then that will incentivize more electricity to come online, more generation to come online. But there was a problem with that theory in that there was no more generation to come online, it was, it was frozen, or it was broken, or it was out of natural gas, whatever it was, there was nothing left to incentivize anybody else to come online.
Robert Bryce 21:48 And that should have been understood quickly by the people running the system say, well, we're not seeing any more new generation, we need to, you know, take the cap down, and they didn't do it. So I think to me, you know, Bill, what's important is to think about okay, well, what's next? Okay, so we were getting a better and better post mortem of the winter storm Yuri to me, what's the question as we look at the future? Well, I think we the Texas grid has become too dependent on on gas and renewables. We need more baseload power, I don't think we're going to be building any more coal fired power plants, even in Texas, right. I don't think there's much of a future for coal in the US because of the political headwinds, particularly under this administration. That's it? Well, if that's the case, then I'm going to repeat what I've been saying for many years, which is we have to embrace the atom, we need to do more nuclear. And we need to get started. I think it could work in Texas, but you're going to need some kind of market reform in Texas, it's going to value that asset in a way that makes it sense for customers or for investors to come in. And it's a problem now, even with gas fired generation, it's going to be perhaps even more difficult with nuclear. But I wouldn't take the lead here, I think we need to be, you know, embracing the future and looking at well, how do we make sure what's the priority priority isn't necessarily just have an open free market, let everybody play? You know, the most important thing is we have a dependable, reliable, affordable source of power that we have 24/7 that will not fail. And we need that if we're going to continue growing. And right now. It's just not working. We're not incenting, enough new reliable generation in the system. So we need reform, will it happen?
Bill Peacock 24:05 the what there's, I've read enough about that, in the papers that it seems to be that there are people who are working really hard on innovating new technology when it comes to nuclear energy, but they never build it. And that seems to me to be the problem because because there are regulatory barriers that that either just flat out prohibit the building of it, new generations of nuclear or it's so prohibitively expensive to get past all the regulations that people just don't build a deal to kind of understand. I mean, those
Robert Bryce 24:39 Regular problems in the white array inventory thicket around nuclear is just incredibly difficult. I mean, it just flat is and there are many people working around it and I have been very critical of the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because of the way they have they rescinded some licenses in January that they had already granted under the Trump administration. You got me going here, peacock, I'm not I haven't even had that didn't have one cup of coffee this afternoon. But your
Bill Peacock 26:14 Well, that's great. This is really good conversation. And it kind of leads back to your book that you wrote. And it's a question of a question of power. And in that book, you you looked, I mean, you didn't look just the United States, you looked at a worldwide issue of reliable electricity. And you know, it's here in Texas, we actually experienced some third world conditions for about a week or so, when, you know, we didn't have electricity, a lot of us didn't have electricity or water. You know, in my house, I was fortunate enough to live next to a right around the corner from a nursing home. So I never ran out of electricity. But I didn't have water for about a week, I was melting snow, I had fish tanks outside catching snow off the roof, you know, dry, run off off the roof, all these kinds of things. I mean, you would never expect to experience here. Yet. Those kinds of experiences are not that unexpected in different parts of the world. Ken, can you kind of explain to us why America is so far ahead of the rest of the world. When it when it comes to having a stable, reliable electric grid?
Robert Bryce 27:23 Sure. Well, I liked that question, Bill and something I've thought about quite a lot because I have for the last six years, I've been all over the world. I'm a very fortunate man. I mean, let me just be clear, I'm grateful I you know, I get to go around the world and talk to people about the most important issues in the in the world today, you know, energy and power systems and going around the world and looking at the world through the lens of electricity and the ice on Lebanon, Puerto Rico, what did I understand what is to me clear, electric grids provide almost a perfect reflection of the societies they power. So in Beirut, the because the system is because the entire government, the whole government, everything is corrupted in Lebanon, right? It's very factional between the Shia, the Sunni, and the Maronites. And so they all have one thing that it's the corruption is everywhere, so the grid doesn't work. And so because the grid doesn't work, nearly everyone in Lebanon pays two electric bills, one to the generator mafia, and the other two electricity do livan, which is the state owned utility. But EDL can't provide power all the time. So people have two bills, they pay the generator mafia when the main power plant goes out, which it's almost always out now, because Lebanon is in an ongoing crisis that is absolutely crippling the whole country that they do whatever they have to do. So what is clear to me is that you have to have a spritely grid, you have to have a society in which people believe in the system, and they have to pay for their own electricity, they can't steal it, otherwise, the whole system degrades. So, you know, it's a very difficult thing to make it to establish and to make work, electric grids at scale. And the US and advanced countries have done it because they have the rule of law, they have people that respect the law, they you know, and in places where you don't have that rule of law where the system the society doesn't work, the electric grid isn't gonna work.
Bill Peacock 29:09 What distinguishes, I mean, how did we get to the place where we can have this kind of a grid? Because one of the reasons I'm asking this question is so we got this nice sought electricity grid, but as we saw just a year or so ago, sometimes that can be a danger. How did we get here and and then, how did how can we sustain that and not turn back into a third world country?
Robert Bryce 29:32 Well, I think first it takes a I think some sobriety on the part of the policymakers to to sit back and say, Wait a minute, we can't monkey around with this system. This is too important. We can't just leave it to the market. We can't have overbearing government we ain't wait but we need sobriety and we need the finally balance that that that tension between government and and and private in
Bill Peacock 30:51 And well, I'm all for stable governments and civil society. I'm not sure that seems like over history that over winning governments have, in fact, led to less stable governments and societies,
Robert Bryce 31:06 no doubt about it. But let me do I'll just finish one point on that, because I was in Chicago last week. And I'd love Chicago. I hadn't been there. And sometimes, Samuel Insull, who's one of the most famous and most vilified titans of the electric age, was really a great innovator and knew that electricity was a natural monopoly. And so he actually sought regulation from the government because he said, Look, we're in natural monopolies, it makes no sense for everybody to string wires to every house won't work, right? We're a natural monopoly, you got to, you know, we need proper regulation. So, again, I mean, this is tricky. And I'm not.
Bill Peacock 31:48 Well, here's here's my problem in Texas is that so was entirely against the interest of consumers, and the average tax and so I don't know the exact way to fix that. But it always makes me cautious when I see government messing up things to think that government is the solution to all that.
Robert Bryce 34:52 Well, look, you haven't heard me say that. I'm not saying it's the solution to all that but what we are going to find and you know, back to where we started, you know,
This idea of 10.5 the reality of the 10 point 5 billion in debt that is going to be securitized in one way or another and will be repaid by consumers from both gas and electric utilities. One of the key issues that's looming now is not just the 10 point 5 billion bill, but is the other civil litigation against are caught and the big utilities for the failures of the for the failure, the power failures. And then that leads to my point here, the key question is, is are caught a state entity because they're caught has been claiming sovereign immunity? And so far, they have not been the courts of saying no, you're not a sob. You don't, you are not a part of the state. So what is it that again, this goes back to one of the fundamental problems, and the belief in where we'll disagree? Is this idea of the RTO and the regional transmission organization and the restructuring of the market that was favored by Enron, i My first book was on Enron, that oh, well, we'll just treat electricity like a commodity. And well, okay, it worked for a while. And you know, a lot of independent power producers made a lot of money, and a lot of traders made a lot of money. That hasn't been good for the consumer. And I would argue still, again, that it is not and this couldn't have billion is going to be paid by the consumer. And if ERCOT is found liable in the courts, and doesn't have sovereign immunity, the 10 point 5 billion could be down payment. I mean, it could be significantly more than that. So just because there's a broader skein of issues here, they're in courts now that is going to take a long time to resolve. We're just kind of in the second or third inning now in terms of what is this final cost going to be?
Bill Peacock 36:31 Yeah, and I'm glad you brought us back to that. Because I took I took your article and started doing some pulled the numbers out of that, start doing some research on my own, and then started trying to come up with some kind of annual costs to this thing. And my take on all this is that
You know what it costs on an average residential bill, and I'm estimating about $341 a year. And that's going to go on to see those numbers, because I've been trying to get some numbers on that as well, because I was in fact talking to some guys about this yesterday, some lobbyists, the reliability unit commitment that's different from the or DC or DC stands for wet again. operating reserve demand curve. Yeah. That's the ruck you're talking about. And that's what I that's what I was talking about as the price setters. You know, that's one of the price matters out there. And it's mainly the stuff that's running on the ancillary market. Now we're kind of talking back and forth, like we're having coffee instead of talking to our to our audience, but but I think this is all important stuff. Right?
Robert Bryce 39:06 Right. Well, I've just pulled up the other piece that I wrote about Forbes, and this is from January. And to me, it's interesting. My brothers in the insurance business, my father was in the insurance business, and they've had some success at it. And my brother is great. It's wonderful in business. And I talked to him about this after I saw this first article about it, and I wrote about it, but 131 different insurers are facing, have sued or caught 131 insurers, so but you also have individual property and casualty and, you know, put slip and fall and other kinds of and tort claims against ERCOT. So, but these insurers are suing because they lost money, and they have people coming to them. And they say, Well, hey, it's not as the ERCOT is the one that's that's responsible here. So just bring it back to this again, to just reinforce the 10.5 billions a lot of money. But if our code is found to be liable, and the legislature doesn't grant sovereign immunity, well, what is that going to look like? I mean, because it's going to be a mass tort claim. Not seeing it work so well here.
Bill Peacock 40:23 It's a mess and you're right, these lawsuits against ERCOT if they're allowed to proceed, or either or not really against ERCOT they're either against Texas ratepayers, or Texas taxpayers. That's who's going to be on the hook here.
Robert Bryce 40:36 Yeah, well, and there's a lot of overlap between the ratepayers and the taxpayers
Bill Peacock 40:39 It's the same the same bunch of folks right one way or another we're gonna get it
Robert Bryce 40:44 I guess we will I don't know whether my I guess my kids were you know even young kids with their pet bags um, they are they are taxpayers because they're paying sales tax at the at the grocery store at the you know, here I'm going to date myself at the five and dime
Bill Peacock 41:24 And don't forget you can go to Robertbryce.com and find out all you need to know about electricity and I really highly recommend his book that he wrote a question question of power right like like,
Robert Bryce: A question of power electricity and the Wealth of Nations and I'm on Twitter at power hungry PW are hungry and now bill I'm on Tik Tok. Yes, right? Tik Tok. I'm on PW are hungry on Tik Tok. I'm on YouTube. I'm omnipresent in my podcast is the power hungry podcast. So Oh, in my film, my documentary juice how electricity explains the world. Yeah. multiple properties. Peacock, I'm selling the soap.
Bill Peacock: All right. Well, thank you, Robert, for being here. And thanks to all the listeners for coming in and listeners today. And also once again, thanks to our sponsor, Texas scorecard.
Robert Bryce 9:16 And but why did that happen? It was because they got, as your numbers point out, I need to follow, I need to just pull it up real quickly. But over $20 billion, no, it's more than that. The massive amount of subsidies was what motivated all of that spending. So the and I want to point out that there are numerous reports that would McKinsey and the Texas section of the Society of Civil Engineers had pointed directly to the problem of over dependence on weather dependent renewables. And that is one of the fundamental problems until ERCOT cancelled that the grid is going to remain I think in in a difficult position and consumer is going to pay the cost.
Bill Peacock 9:55 Yeah, I was just up to the Capitol testifying last week on Chapter
Robert Bryce 12:42 What I write about this business, and I got solar panels, why because I got big fat subsidy from the feds from the city. And then for a while they're paying me $100 A megawatt hour that will shoot I'm getting 24 times the wholesale price in Texas for a while.
a philosophical argument about monopoly versus free market, and I don't, here's the thing, well, I'll cut to it on the free market, I just hit electricity is different bill, and we talked about it as a commodity, electricity is different. It's not a molecule, it's a service, it's not a commodity, and we can't let the service fail. And I think that's where some of the policy, a lot of the policy jumps and rails, right? Because, no, you can't allow this network to fail. And yet, we're treating it as a commodity and intend treating it rather cavalierly. And I think that's the, the root of a lot of the problems we're having in the system, and I'm just gonna throw that steak down in the sand.
Bill Peacock 16:19 I get that point. And I've heard that argument quite a bit. I would just respond to that by saying, I've also heard, you know, I've been around this business for a little while. And I've worked on a number of issues, where people have come to me and said, because I work for a free market think tank, and politicians, on the Republican side, at least want to be seen as champions of the free market. So when I'm going up there, not not that all of them are. And they get kind of angry at me when I can point out that they may not be that, but then they come to me afterwards and say, Look, Bill, you know, I'm as free market as the next guy. But free markets just don't work in this industry. And they'll point to homeowners insurance or electricity or wherever they title insurance, wherever it is. And so I'm a little skeptical when and I get your point. But I'm a little skeptical of arguments to say that free markets work everywhere except here.
Robert Bryce 23:20 I wish it would. But I'm not so hopeful because of the entrenched interests and the frankly, the complexity of the system as it exists now and whether it can be even and I say that humbly, because I look at it all. I'm thinking it's a miracle even worse as it is.
Bill Peacock 23:37 Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up nuclear because that's something I don't spend a lot of time a lot I don't understand very well, it's not talking about just how it functions within the system, but just the building of nuclear generation at all. Obviously, it's been a long time since anybody's built nuclear in the United States, or probably around most of the world, I would guess. But it seems to me that
Robert Bryce 30:00 Enterprise and there's that lie, I think to turn it back to nuclear, then Bill is there in lies the part that is going to require real finesse. And I don't use that word very often. But I think it's the right one is that, okay? If we're going to incent nuclear energy to be built, what are the what's the way to make it happen, and I think that eventually, the US government is going to have to have some kind of a national champion, similar to Ross atom, or in Russia, or SK power, I think in South Korea, that you have companies that are have strong government backing, and the government is bought in so that they'll will handle the waste, for instance, which is an issue that only governments really, you're gonna be qualified or be able to say, Okay, we'll manage the waste or will govern the waste. There are a lot of supply chain issues here. They're just require. They require stable governments and civil society. And that is a big requirement.
There's a nuance here between this, but unbalanced. And I think it's a difficult one. And I understand take your point about you don't want too much government, but you don't want too little either. A five and dime anymore at 711 While they're buying a slushie or a bag of potato chips
Bill Peacock 41:05 Well, I think that's a that's a good place to bring our conversation to an end Robert and I really appreciate you being on the Liberty Cafe this week.
Robert Bryce 41:13 Always happy to do it Bill there's much to talk about I wish you the best of luck always happy to talk about our car and start shaking our heads about darkness uncomplicated
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Texans’ electricity bills are skyrocketing. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we examine how Texas politicians’ refusal to end renewable energy subsidies is increasing the price of electricity while reducing the reliability of the grid.
Texas is projected to have a budget surplus of $27 billion next year. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we look at how some politicians want to spend it, and how they should spend it: on eliminating property taxes.
Experts seem to rule the world today. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we look at how experts and government are taking the place of God in the debates over culture and policy.
Texas politicians are playing politics with the reliability of the Texas grid. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we discuss how state leaders are covering up their support for renewable energy by making our electricity more expensive.
Though we have seen some good things come out of Texas government in recent years, economic liberty continues to suffer. Please join us on this week’s Liberty Cafe as we discuss the contribution of Texas Republicans to the collapse of liberty.
The world around us seems to have little understanding of who God is. Join us on this week’s Liberty Cafe as we discuss how Christians should go about explaining to the world why God matters, especially when it comes to the culture and civil government.
If there has ever been proof that we live in a fallen world and need redemption through Jesus Christ, it is seen in the assault on human sexuality in today’s culture. Please join us this week on the Liberty Cafe as we examine why men cannot have babies.
Many people, even Christians, have made idols of science and experts in recent years. Listen in this week as we walk through some of my favorite books that debunk myths about experts and can help us return to the biblical roots of science.
Life can be complicated, but biblical truths are simple and straightforward. On this week’s Liberty Cafe, we look at how progressives and liberals attempt to hide the consequences their actions regarding inflation, abortion, and racism by complicating the simple truths of life.
God designed civil government to secure life and liberty. Join us on this week’s Liberty Café as we walk through Scripture from Genesis to Revelation to better understand what liberty and biblical government looks like.
Blacks are leaving inner cities just like a generation of whites did before them. One example: Washington D.C. is no longer a black-majority city. On this week’s Liberty Café, I discuss why progressives are upset about this effort by blacks to improve their lives.
Pornography in public school libraries and school choice are both hot topics in Texas at the moment. On this week’s Liberty Café, we take a look at the problems of expanding Texas’ public education system by using vouchers to fund education at private schools.