Ken Paxton is suing Harris County over their unconstitutional guaranteed income program.
The State of Texas and Harris County will again duke it out in court, this time over a guaranteed basic income pilot program that would give 1,500 households in the county $500 per month.
Harris County announced the program last year through Harris County Public Health. On Tuesday, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed suit asking the court to halt its implementation before the April 24 start date.
Attorney General Ken Paxton said of the suit, “This scheme is plainly unconstitutional. Taxpayer money must be spent lawfully and used to advance the public interest, not merely redistributed with no accountability or reasonable expectation of a general benefit. I am suing to stop officials in Harris County from abusing public funds for political gain.”
The OAG’s suit reads, “There is no such thing as free money — especially in Texas. The Texas Constitution expressly prohibits giving away public funds to benefit individuals — a common sense protection to prevent cronyism and ensure that public funds benefit all citizens.”
Central to the state’s argument is that counties, “unlike home-rule cities,” have a substantially more narrow scope of authority. “[T]he legal basis for any action taken must be grounded ultimately in the constitution or statute,” the filing adds.
Both cities and counties are creations of the state, but municipalities have the home-rule provision that grants them a broader array of authority than is granted to counties. The range of that home-rule status is the subject of another suit, this one flowing in the opposite direction, against the Texas Legislature’s new field preemption law passed last year.
The City of Austin just completed the first year of its universal basic income program, allotting 85 families with $1,000 per month.
If there’s any insane, hard left, unconstitutional socialist program idea, there’s a good chance Austin will be in the forefront of pushing for it.
Texas’ contention here is that while a home-rule municipality could enact such a program, a county is explicitly precluded by the Texas Constitution.
Article III, Section 52(a) reads: “Except as otherwise provided by this section, the Legislature shall have no power to authorize any county, city, town or other political corporation or subdivision of the State to lend its credit or to grant public money or thing of value in aid of, or to any individual, association or corporation whatsoever, or to become a stockholder in such corporation, association or company.”
The suit adds, “Second, Harris County does not retain public control over the funds. As described above, the payments have ‘no strings attached,’ and the recipients can use the money however they wish.”
The OAG requests a temporary restraining order against the program and, eventually, a permanent injunction against its operation.
Using taxpayer money to pay people for breathing (or existing) is one of the stupidest pieces of socialist bullshit to come down the pike in many a moon. It’s immoral to take money from those who work in order to bribe those who don’t. It’s also a great way to kickback money directly to the hands of leftwing activists, since the grifters claim that they cannot reveal people receiving such payoffs due to “confidentiality.”
Despite the hosannas offered up by the hard left and economic illiterates everywhere to the scheme as a means of helping the poor, the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment (SIME/DIME) experiments showed such no-strings-attached checks from the government hurt the recipients, reducing both the desire to work and lowering actual income among the recipients. See Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, pages 150-153 for details.
Any “Guaranteed Income” taking money from taxpayers and paying people not to work is not just unconstitutional, a bad idea and a moral hazard, it’s an avenue for fraud and an insult to anyone who works for a living.
It’s just another in a long line of illegal left wing experiments from Hidalgo’s office, all of which deserve to be crushed like bugs.
Tags: Charles Murray, Democrats, fraud, Harris County, Ken Paxton, Lawsuit, Lina Hidalgo, SIME/DIME, Texas, Universal Basic Income, waste, Welfare State
UBI is the kind of thing that makes me seriously consider taking a significant reduction in my quality of life such that I would be willing off grid in a tent on national forest land than pay another goddamn cent in taxes. We’re so far beyond the common American taxpayer having virtually no say in how tax dollars are spent. This is a humiliation ritual. I have so had it with this shit.
Attorney General Ken Paxton may well have the best record of any AG when it comes to challenging Leftish overreach. He would make a fine VP choice.
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Yes, but Trump is already going to win Texas, so adding Paxton to the ticket wouldn’t add any advantage geographically
Mitt Romney won Indiana by >10 points in 2012. Would you argue that it was necessary for Trump to add Pence to the ticket in order to take Indiana in 2016?!
It was necessary to add an established Republican politician acceptable to conservatives to the ticket to keep Republicans from staying home.
Trump is no longer an outsider who needs to reach out to a skeptical Republican faction, he’s now at the center of the party ideologically. He doesn’t need to worry about conservatives showing up.
Most leftists have daddy issues, male or female. You go back and look at their childhoods, most of them were estranged from their fathers, raised by women, and have never had the slightest visibility on what it took to support the family. I’ve lost track of the number of these creatures who’ve told me things like “Dad was never around; I only ever saw my mother…”, and the crap they were fed by that parasitical “mother thing” is a large part of the problem. They feel “owed” just for existing; the paternal influences in their lives were minimal, and they never, ever saw what their fathers did to support the family. If there was even a father present.
Which is where this false image comes from, the one where “Daddy will provide” is so endemic. They can’t imagine a situation where “Daddy” won’t be there, and if he isn’t? Well, they’ll create one, in the state.
This is why single women with children are inimical to long-term survival of civilization, and why you cannot allow the state to supplant the family. There’s no connection, no understanding of where those resources come from, such that the beneficiaries will consume and consume and consume, with no heed to consequence. You could put these parasites up in mansions (which they’d shortly wreck and turn into hovels), and they’d only demand more and more.
There needs to be a great divorce, and the state has to get out of “taking care of people”. It doesn’t work; the “public” soon becomes a gaping maw, consuming more and more of the common resources until it, thoughtless and heedless, expends everything. You wonder why we’re nearly 40 trillion dollars in debt? It’s not defense; it’s entitlements and all the rest. The marching morons are here, and running the show. Their names are Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Kerry, and their Republican enablers like Romney. They’re simply demagogues, feeding the gaping maw for their own benefit.