To be fair, the “their” in the tweet might not refer to Texans. In which case, he’s just being confusing and inarticulate, not completely brain-dead.
Tru dat. I was disagreeing with a statement that it was a foregone conclusion that most Texans will “be voting red with enthusiasm, on the basis that the Democrats and environmentalists caused all their problems.”
There’s a lot of middle between “Texas is guaranteed to stay red” and “Texas is sure to turn blue any day now.” One can disagree with one without espousing the other.
Happy Birthday!
Thanks! Waking, baking.
The outcry elicited angry calls for action from lawmakers from both parties and prompted Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to hold an emergency meeting with legislators on Saturday to discuss the enormous bills.
“We have a responsibility to protect Texans from spikes in their energy bills that are a result of the severe winter weather and power outages,”
He’s from the government, and he finally wants to help.
They will even take federal funding, although they’re not willing to admit the hypocrisy.
Host Dana Bash challenged him, saying: “I’m hearing you say that the federal government is going to help to bail out, and to pay bills in a state which is in part in this mess because it wants to be separate from the federal government. That’s kind of rich, don’t you think?”
McCaul dodged the question
This sort of US disaster relief often ends up being akin to the absence of universal health care: treatment ends up costing (all of us) orders of magnitude more than prevention would have.
[just part of privatizing profit and socializing loss – 'Murica !]
And … of course … when Red State shit breaks, as it so often does, that gubmint money tastes so, so good.
:rolleyes:
Only because he wants to be re-elected not get lynched.
That story has been out long enough that those fuckers should have already been working on it.
The exorbitant bills are a fine example of what a fully free market without regulation will get you.
Yeah, the absolute unwillingness to spend is baffling and infuriating. I mean, in 2020 there was some griping about paying for some COVID related stuff and every time there’s a hurricane there’s some whining from the state government.
They whine despite having a 10 BILLION (more or less) dollar “rainy day” fund that they’re generally unwilling to tap into. Like I told my wife, if COVID and everything that’s going on doesn’t qualify as a “rainy day”, what does? Despite that, those clowns in the Legislature are talking about using it to fill in funding gaps in the state budget so as to not raise taxes, instead of using it to directly aid the populace and/or supercharge anti-COVID efforts. I mean, I can sort of see the economic benefits to not raising taxes when times are tight like this, but my opinion is that they should have lavishly funded the anti-COVID efforts with that money.
Why does he hate the free market? Is he some kind of socialist?
Kind of reminds me of the Centralia, Penna. mine fire. It was started back in 1962 two days after the town of Centralia burned the contents of a strip mine land fill. Whether this started the coal mine fire is debated even today but the fire in the dump proved stubborn to extinguish.
A month later a contractor offered to overhaul the contents of the dump for $175 but the city council turned him down. Later efforts costing hundreds of thousands of dollars failed to stop the fire and it burns to this day. Federal congress finally bought out most of the town (except for a few stubborn individuals) for $42-million.
Yep - I’d like an accounting of how much these customers SAVED over the past couple of decades by going to cheaper providers in a deregulated market.
Dependability is a good thing - which is unlikely to be adequately provided in a free market where both sellers and buyers have a short view of the future and past.
Conservative politicians always love to talk up “free market” solutions, but they always balk when the free market manages to actually impose significant costs on their voters. And so, inevitably, they use tax payer funds to subsidize those they believe are being treated inequitably by the market. If only there were a word for that. . .
“Let’s raise the charges to a point where nobody can afford to pay them.”
When has THAT ever worked?
Except is not free at all. The product is not scarce at all so it should not be more expensive. What is scarce is their ability to get it to you. So they get to charge you more due to their own failings and business short-sightedness. A “free market approach” would have meant that they would have planned for and upgraded their infrastructure. Surely they knew there were problems, although they probably didn’t expect a catastrophic failure.
Ted Cruz hands out water.
Sure doesn’t look like he’s anywhere near any snow, ice and pissed-off constituents.
There’s not a lot of ice and snow left in Texas. It hit 60s/70s across most of the state yesterday and today. Power was almost totally back at that point as well, though water in several cities is still a problem.
Pissed-off constituents? I guarantee there were a few around, but he’s never been all that popular. It’s only the R after his name that’s gotten him this far.
How such an unlikable asshole ever thought he could win the White House, I’ll never know.
Well, no, this kind of flawed reasoning is precisely why Texas is in such dire straits. Absent government regulation that obliges them to do so, private corporations have no incentive to spend money on infrastructure that will only make a difference in rare extreme situations like this, because it’s not profitable to do so.
Extremist “free market” proponents don’t understand what markets are and how they are supposed to work. The requirement is not that there be no rules. The requirement is just that the rules should be the same for everyone. The rules - the framework for how market participants are all allowed to behave - should be set up by government for the benefit of society.
Cheating?
Hey, it worked for Trump!