Category Archives: Articles

You don’t hear much about workers’ compensation these days. That’s good news. Several years ago, workers’ compensation was ranked as one of Texas’ bigger business problems. Rates were skyrocketing, up 200 percent between 1985 and 1990. Insurance carriers threatened to … Continue reading →

Highly educated engineers and scientists can work just about wherever they want. So how to get them to work in a rural area just South of Dallas–even if the project is as important as the Superconducting Supercollider? One way is … Continue reading →

Media stories about environmental disaster abound in the modern world–oil spills, destruction of rain forests, holes in the ozone layer–but now the school finance crisis in Texas must be counted among them. Countless trees are being destroyed to provide the … Continue reading →

Should the cops practice medicine? Should the legislature pass laws that make you hurt? Senate Bill 370 does both of those things. It has worthy goals–saving money and minimizing fraud. But it would also make a lot of people suffer … Continue reading →

Right when you think good sense is on permanent leave, along will come an example of such good leadership, good policy, and good timing that one is encouraged to settle back for another century or two of democracy. The example … Continue reading →

Most Americans seem to think that mathematics is a monster to be feared and hated. About 70 percent of the graduate students in engineering and 54 percent of the graduate students in mathematics are foreigners. If the number of American … Continue reading →

School finance reform in Texas is beginning to resemble a nineteenth century Russian novel. The story line runs across generations, the plot is complex, the prose is tedious, and everybody dies in the end. Forty years after the enactment of … Continue reading →

Recent television and newspaper reports have called attention to a secret federal agency’s establishment of a questionable line of succession to the Presidency to assure continued government in the event of a devastating nuclear attack. A New York Times story … Continue reading →

Health care is the top concern of many Americans in the 1990s. How do we get health care? And how can we afford it? Health care is becoming the political, social, and collective bargaining issue of the 1990s. In the … Continue reading →

Within the next few years, hundreds of thousands of highly trained men and women will be mustered out of the armed forces. Of the 750,000 soon-to-be veterans who will leave military service over the next five years, about 150,000 are … Continue reading →