Daniel Miller opened this week back at the desk after a forced break (a hardware failure killed the previous Thursday) and spent the hour answering questions that ran from the practical to the existential. The night kept circling one idea: the gap between what Texans are told and what is actually happening on the ground.
The sharpest example came from South Texas, where New World screwworm was confirmed in cattle north of the Mexico border. Miller walked through the logic plainly. The pest was supposedly contained in Mexico, the border was supposedly secure, and yet infected cattle moved across in a trailer, uninspected. He treats that as proof, not anecdote: if a load of infected livestock can cross, the border is not what the official line claims, and Texas will have to take responsibility for it again because the federal government will not. He framed the screwworm itself as something close to a weapon of mass destruction for an agricultural economy, while making clear he was not alleging it was deliberate.
He also previewed the long-awaited update to the 2015 Can Texas Make It study, which he has spent the day reviewing ahead of publication. The new version goes past the raw money flows that outside analysts fixate on and accounts for matching-fund requirements, unfunded federal mandates, Social Security, Medicare, the federal debt, and inflation. His takeaway: the old figure of a 120 to 160 billion dollar annual overpayment understates the real cost once debt and inflation are factored in, and the federal government can no longer even say honestly how much of its spending lands in Texas, since key reporting was killed off in 2012. On taxes, he called property and income taxes fundamentally immoral and argued that ending property taxes outright is achievable, and gets far easier once the federal drain is gone. And on the wave of data centers and corporate arrivals, he located the real fault line ahead: not red versus blue but rural versus urban, with rural Texas forced to surrender water and grid capacity to growth it never asked for.
Questions answered in this episode
- Will Daniel and Cara be at the Republican Party of Texas convention in Houston, and where can supporters find the TNM there?
- How will the TNM coordinate volunteers and delegates at the convention, and is it being run through the Texian app or text messaging?
- How does Daniel feel about the prospect of a civil war in the United States, and are the odds rising?
- What is the information supporters have been asking for since 2016, and what does the updated Can Texas Make It report actually show?
- Will Texas ever reach a point where seniors who have paid off their homes no longer owe property taxes?
- What does Daniel make of the surge of data centers and large businesses moving into Texas?
- Has there been any news on the screwworm infection discovered in South Texas cattle?
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