If you think about it, none of us really own our homes.  We are all serfs who owe allegiance to the State and local governments.  I HATE property taxes.  If we do not pay our property taxes, the taxing authorities can foreclose on our homes and they get paid first, even before the mortgage company that may have lent the money to buy the home. With so many Californians moving to Texas, the price of homes and the price of land is rising rapidly.  We cannot stop fellow Americans from moving here.  Oftentimes, these folks from other states are bringing proceeds from the sale of their high prices properties to buy property in Texas, sometime sight unseen!  This also increases everyone’s property taxes because of inflation of land values.  Some retirees and folks on fixed incomes can no longer keep their homes because they cannot afford the higher property taxes. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the state of Texas began repealing more and more elements of its property tax, including the state-wide school tax. In 1982, the state completely abolished all forms of state property tax and instead shifted the responsibility for assessing and collecting property taxes to local governments.

Citation: The long, long history of  the Texas Property Tax;  office of Texas Comptroller.

We need to eliminate ALL tax on real estate owned, especially those properties that are homesteads. Please understand that in order to eliminate property taxes, the revenue that they generate MUST be replaced by other sources of revenue. School Districts MUST be properly funded. It will be a lot of work to make this happen, but it will be worth it.

My dear wife of 37 years, Carolyn, and I have been blessed with six wonderful children.  They are all adults, now.  Six out of six Davis children received excellent preparatory education in the College Station Independent School District.  And now, six out of six Davis children proudly wear their Texas Aggie rings.   Although we do not have much experience with the Bryan Independent School District, I have heard nothing but good things about it.

Many, many teachers in our public education system are underpaid.  We need to tackle that problem quickly.  My wife and I are grateful for the many excellent teachers our kids in CSISD.  The decision to be a teacher is a sacrifice and a labor of love.  We need to ease these teachers’ burdens, though, and compensate many of them much more than they are being paid.

Yet not all parts of the State are blessed with such outstanding public education options that we have in Brazos County.  For that reason, I favor providing a way for parents in areas where public education is inadequate, to educate their children through alternative means even using School Vouchers, if necessary.  If my daughter were in junior high and went out of town for a sporting event and was expected to sleep in a hotel room with a boy who “identified” as a girl, I would pull her out of that school system in a heartbeat.  If my children were subject to school discipline for not following the administrators’ “woke” policies, my wife and I would have our children educated elsewhere.

On the other hand, all of us have an interest in ensuring that children everywhere in the State are well educated.  I have known people who decided to home school their children but had no commitment to excellence and left their own children disadvantaged.  I am by no means against homeschooling!  When my wife and I graduated from Texas A&M University, Dr. Frank Vandiver was its president.  I am informed and believe that he was home schooled.  Dr. Vandiver was a bright, intellectual, well-educated, and well-rounded wonderful man. It is just that there has to be some accountability to ensure that no child is neglected and left uneducated.  

We have many dutiful, patriotic, truth-loving election administrators across the great State of Texas.  Yet, there are pockets of corruption during elections in parts of the State that hurt everyone who want fair elections.  We need to take additional steps to strengthen and improve even more the integrity of our elections.  Our goal should be that all citizens should be able to vote (easily); those who are not eligible to vote should find it impossible to do so. 

 I wholeheartedly support Governor Abbott’s efforts to rely on the 10th Amendment to pick up the slack on border control where our Federal Government is failing miserably.  We need to support and strengthen this effort.  Please know that I am NOT against immigration per se.  My ancestor in the Davis line, Dolar Davis, emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1630.  Unless we are of Native American descent, we are all descendants of immigrants.  What I am against is disorderly, uncontrolled, haphazard, and dangerous immigration.  We need to keep out the bad guys that hate us and want to destroy us.

The reckless, feckless spending practices of our federal government are causing very high inflation.  Inflation, by definition, is the increase in the money supply.  Every time that the Federal Reserve creates new dollars to buy Treasury Bill to keep our bloated Federal government’s binge spending going, it makes the dollars in your pocket and the dollars in your bank accounts worth a little less.  Texas is well known for its fiscal responsibility and its “Rainy Day” fund.  The US dollar is on the demise and, unless something changes in Washington, the dollar could collapse like the German mark did in the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s.  Texas government needs to keep some of its reserves in hard assets.

Like teachers, our law enforcement officers make great sacrifices.  They also often put their lives on the line for us.  We need to support and provide for them.  The media like to sensationalize the few dramatic instances where a bad cop does wrong.  Yet, there is a vast, silent majority of peace officers who put on their badges every day, do their police work for long hours, and put themselves in harm’s way.  We need to support them.  There are things that we can do at the State level to protect police officers all across the State.  For example, in a recent session, the Texas legislature recently passed SB2222 to provide bullet resistant windows for all of the Texas Department of Public Safety patrol vehicles in response to two separate incidences of officers being shot through the windows of their patrol cars.  I would like to see the State government help fund this comparatively inexpensive enhancement of police vehicles for all law enforcement officers, no matter how small or rural the police or Sheriff’s department.  This is but one of the initiatives that I would like to advance in the legislature to help protect law enforcement.