What's Your Point? Overtime | Nov. 1, 2026

Welcome to Watch Your Point Overtime. I scampered down to the break room with Tomorrow Bell. Get her some coffee. On Overtime, we talk about issues of state, national, local, import, international as well. In a more freewheeling fashion, you know all these people. They're awesome. They've been with us from the get-go. Anyway. You know what would really be nice? If tomorrow I had a table for a set of coffee on, wouldn't I? Are you listening, Dart? Can we, folks, can y'all start a petition, send it into the station to get us a table so tomorrow I have some less bitter coffee? Yes. That's my water bottle. Okay, you know, Bill and I are probably, we burn up the phone line. It's not a line anymore, the cloud, talking about what are the numbers looking like. And, Bill, you know, we have the advantage of the guy in Austin. Our own Stephen David here has been crunching numbers pretty hard. It's hard. You know, bottom line, as we go into day of, what does it look like? I don't think we have any idea. I think a clean sweep for the Democrats or a clean sweep for the Republicans are both possible. If you put me in a torture chamber and made me make a prediction, I would say Tallarico wins and then the rest of the Republicans statewide probably win. But I would say that's no better than a 1 in 10 chance, a 2 in 10 chance, something like that. I mean, literally anything can happen. And the reason is this. Increasingly, people are disgusted with the political parties. We see it in the fact that they don't go vote in the primaries. And so right now, in the early vote, there's about 40 percent of the voters that have no primary history. And so we have no idea how those people are going to vote. And we go look at the demographics and say, where are they from and make some guesses and stuff. The problem is all the sort of traditional markers are breaking down in a lot of different ways. You know, rural is a fascinating discussion right now. And by the way, rural is actually down from what it was previously. And so does that indicate that they are really upset about. The USAID, the diesel, the fertilizer prices, does that mean that they prefer to wait until Election Day? I mean, there's so many different variables moving around here. That's reliably an 80-20 Republican group, you know, the rural area. So I'm going to tell you what, I think it's going to be a— by the way, they ought to tune in Tuesday night and watch our election coverage because we're going to be breaking it all down. But I think that as soon as we get the early vote totals in, we're probably going to know what's going to happen. One of the things that fascinated me was the side-by-side between traditionally and well-populated Republican counties like Collin and Montgomery and then the big blue counties, say like Travis and Harris, something like 83%, 85%, and this won't be exact, of 2024 presidential turnout. In early voting in the blue counties, somewhat less, 75, 70 in Montgomery and Collin and Denton. Thank you very much. Will that be because the Republicans prefer to vote day of because they're worried about, you know, all of the alleged hijinks that go on? Or they just like voting day of? But if that holds, that's going to, you know, I've called it the Republican firewall. In the big red suburbs, and I think they're becoming increasingly more purple as people flee the inner city to go to better education. Better public safety, but they bring their politics with them. I mean, any thoughts there, Chris? Well, it will also be that they're just not going to vote because they're angry at what the Republican Party has done. And that is a question that we won't know until Election Day, that they may just not vote this time. I'm disgusted, more than angriest, that they're just disgusted with what they're saying. Yeah, that's maybe a better term. And that is a big question we've talked about for months, that they may not come to the polls at all. The Those changes, those demographic changes, we're waiting to see. A big thing we haven't talked about yet is what's going to happen in Fort Worth, which is going to be... Tarrant County. Tarrant County is going to be a big, big factor in what happens in this election statewide, what happens in Tarrant County this election. And I don't know. I haven't even seen what the numbers look like. That Senate is going to flip up there. Right. That... That special election is going to hold. That Democrat is going to win that seat. So I think we can all agree it looks like the House is going to flip back blue. U.S. House. Yeah. Senate is still up in the air, but we'll wait and see. Bob, I had an interesting conversation with our mutual friend, Ben Streusand, who is on the show, and Ben said, look, a minute after the last ballot is counted, Trump hits hard lame duck status, and there's going to be a major conversation within the Republican Party about the path forward, whether we retain or continue on the MAGA path with this guy, the president, as our leader, or his appointed successor, or we go back to being Reagan Republicans, or somewhere in between. I mean, what are you hearing? I would love to be a fly on the wall. In a Breitbart editorial meeting on the national level. You've been there. Well, the battle's already begun. Yeah. Coming down right now to between DeSantis and J.D. Vance as to if people are starting to line up already on this side or the other as to the future of the Republican Party. And there's going to be a lot of introspection after this election as to where people want to go with it. I do take exception. Bill and I have talked about this before. I think the fact that people stop voting in these primaries, both the Republican and the Democrat, because they're too extreme, is what's causing them to become too extreme. You know, when you pull the people of the middle out... How do these primary elections, and you inflate or flood people in there who are either extreme right or extreme left, the Democratic Socialists and the Democrat Party are trying to take over, the Libertarians kind of took over in the last 10 years of the Republican Party, and it just pushes that out. And if those people would come back in and vote and put candidates in, I think you'd see a more balanced position on both sides. I wish that would happen. You're not going to change the two-party system in this country because they control the legislatures, and they're not going to change it. So the only way around that is to internally take over the parties. All right, Charles, your take on what Republicans do on November 4th, whether this battle is coming, whether to continue down the MAGA path, or to take a step back. And go back to what we saw were the 20th century ideals of the Republican Party. It depends on what happens on November 3rd. I think if we see the successes that some hope, statewide or even across the nation, then it's going to be a signal to double down on whether it's an accurate signal or not, to double down on what we've done. And if not, I can't say that necessarily we're going to change course, because we didn't do that the last time we lost the presidential. It was, you know, everybody said, oh, it's going to be a lame duck, he's leaving, all this. And no, it was for the next eight years, we continued, or not eight years. For four years, we continued down. I mean, yes, MAGA didn't go anywhere. It kind of grew within the party. And I think it's still going to grow. I don't think that's going to go anywhere. I think it might fade in some instances because he's not going to be the president. But I do think that it's going to give him more time to go around the country and encourage candidates that he supports and individuals he wants to see run. And that base is still going to be angry. They're still going to be frustrated with things that are going on, especially if a Democrat wins president after he does. So I don't think that's going anywhere for a long time. I mean, I know a lot of donors had hoped that after his loss that it was going to kind of just put that behind us, and I know a lot of folks are saying that now with Ken Paxton, that if he loses, that they hope it just kind of goes behind us. But I don't see that happening because there are certain individuals in the party who ignite something within the base and that keeps them motivated and keeps them coming out and fighting, and others don't do that for them. Tomorrow, Bill has talked about a political writer who some years ago Spotted the period of time we're heading into now, 29, 28, 29, as a time of transition, you know, where... The system reaches a negative critical mass where it's just horrific. And there are more and more voters like you, people who are independent-minded and are not wedded to either party completely and are willing and capable of splitting their ticket. Okay. You've even joked, you said, I'm going to sign up. You get frustrated. I'm going to sign up for that Bill King party. Yes, my ballot. It was like, similar to Bill's, it was checking, as I already told you all. I'm supporting Don Buckingham, voted for her, for the GLO, and Nate Sheets for the Agriculture Commissioner. So don't call me because you know I don't give a damn. Anyway, I can see that coming. You know, when you said that these things are going to hold, I remember when the biggest word in Republican Party was Tea Party. None the more things change times change COVID was a culture shock for the world and so we ain't never going to be the same but I do believe that if the path that we are currently on which is not sustainable I mean the gas higher than you ever thought it would be the diesel which I don't even. You know, look at diesel. Now I look at diesel because I know my groceries are higher because they've got to put diesel. The farmers have got to use it for their equipment. And railroad. And the railroad, exactly. I mean, when you look at the effect of that on the nation, the world, that is not sustainable. It's just not. And this war that we're in, how the hell do we get into this war? And we're criticizing other wars. And then you've got the ending of farmers. Farmers, we need food. To survive and the farmers have been the backbone of this country and they have been attacked over and over again, starting with which I said the closing of USAID, which for the bulk of them, that was their biggest contract. Then you do the tariffs. So the contracts they had with foreign countries to sell their beef and chicken, that's gone because the tariffs are so high. Then you turn around and you remove the water that they need in the rural areas because you're building these big old data centers and it's sucking up the water and the energy. Then you turn around and you get in this war and now diesel high and they can't even run there. Because when I was told at the poll how the farmers wrote the president a letter, I'm like. But you shouldn't take a letter. Look at this. This is not sustainable. I love America. I love America. And you all know, I told you I spoke at the Capitol three weeks ago with the president of the UN on America United. And she was amazing. She said how we are still the number one nation in the world. Don't believe what you see. She said you are America. Don't let politics kill America. We are all Americans. And I know that there's going to be a breaking point. And I'm going to be VP of the Bill King party when that starts because Democrats will get back in charge and they will do the same stupid stuff that they did before. Because they got their own agendas, the people are the last thought until election time. They're tripping over each other, come and everything to see you and stuff. And so, I mean, that is concerning to me, Texas is concerning to me. I'm more of a gambler than Bill. I'd put some money on some of them other races, flipping Democrat. I really would because of what has been done to the Republican Party, not because of the Democrats. They got nothing to do with them. It's because what has been done to these people that they never imagined, these 60-year-old farms, 70-year-old farms, that they had to sell the land to the data center so they could eat. They never envisioned this would be their life. Bill, I want to ask you this because I interviewed... Congresswoman Silvia Garcia this week, and I said, okay, let's assume you're retaking Congress. What are you going to do? What's the agenda? What's the plan? And it was pretty much what they have proposed in the past, which is, you know. Impeach Trump, impeach Trump, impeach Trump. It was not as much impeach Trump as it was basically gut ICE. There was also suggestions that we need to have Medicare for all, which is, I don't know if we can afford it. And, you know, returning the ACA back to the subsidy situation. That's the only one I agree with so far. And, you know, also something that we've had bipartisan agreement on, which is a path for the Dreamers, the folks that were brought here without. Without, without. When they were babies. Yeah, they were babies. They were brought here by their parents and really didn't have a say in the matter. It doesn't matter. But I go back to that political writer, is it Friedman? No. George Friedman, yeah. What did Friedman say exactly? He said that either the 28 or the 32 presidential election was going to be a reset, kind of like the Reagan's election was in 1980, that there would be some dramatic change in the political system. And he said, I don't think that the two-party system will survive, at least in its current form. Now, that obviously creates a lot of different possibilities. The problem that you have here is, number one, I think Tuesday night is the end of the age of Trump. We're going to be done with him after that. I think this election is going to be a complete rejection of him personally. And we see that in how low his approval rating is. But Trump was never the cause of the problem. Trump was always a symptom of the problem. And what I thought was fascinating was back in the 20... In the 2016 election, when Bernie Sanders mounted his insurrection to take over the Democratic Party, there were all these Bernie Sanders voters that were supporting him in the primary and then switched over and voted for Trump in the general election. And that is because there is a strain of populism in the United States right now that is very angry, and it's on both the left and the right side. It's where this political spectrum actually turns around and becomes kind of a horseshoe. And if you listen to a lot of things that the MAGA people say and a lot of people that the extreme left say, they're very similar messages in a lot of ways. It's about affordability. It's about college being too expensive. It's about having a rational... Immigration system, you know, when you talk to the left and right, nobody really wants to close down the border completely, but they would like something rational. They don't want a bunch of, you know, masked guys running around shooting American citizens. I mean, just a little bit of common sense. So I don't, what I expect to happen is what's happened in the past. The Democrats will get control. They will think they were given a mandate to run their agenda, which they have not. This is not, when you look at the approval ratings of both parties, they're in the tanks. This is not about, you know, you've quoted me a bunch of times saying the only thing Republicans have going for them is how god-awful the Democrats are. Well, that's now flipped. The only thing the Democrats have going for them is how god-awful the Republicans are. And so I suspect once again we'll have an administration that, you know, overplays its hand, thinks that they got a mandate to govern, and so we'll flip right back. The question is, when does this flipping back and forth finally wear out the American people and they demand something different? Now, there is no question, as Bob says, that the two parties have rigged the system to keep competition off the ballot. That is absolutely true. But at some point in time, when they shrink down to such small groups and it's going down every single year in the polls, then the American people are not going to put up with two intellectually, morally bankrupt political parties running the country. So is or will be the next two years of likely stalemate You know, mired in House impeachment hearings is that the prelude to what Friedman has predicted in 2028. So if when the Democrats, I think the Democrats are going to take control of the House. And if they pass Al Green's articles of impeachment, the worst mistake the Democratic Party has made in 100 years. Thank you. Thank you. To finally get control back and then impeach the president when he's only got two years left. I remember when Bill Clinton got impeached and I was my son was in a hospital. I was in the hospital watching this trial. Yeah. And in the final argument, one of the final arguments was made. What are you going to do? He's only got two years left. That was one of the final arguments. His approval ratings went up after they impeached him. Yeah, yeah. And to do this at this time, to admire the country for the last two years of this presidency, when there's so much that needs to be done, it would be a huge, huge political mistake on the Democratic Party. Al Green's articles of impeachment need to die right where they are, and the Democratic Party needs to focus on issues that the public... cares about and can sink their teeth into and can see that they're actually doing something that would benefit the public. Now, you mentioned that Sylvia Garcia said they want to change the ACA back to what it was. That is going to take a constitutional amendment because of the ruling by the United States Supreme Court on the tax issue. It cannot get back to the original bill without an amendment of the United States Constitution. Well, I think, Chris, I think what she would do is extend the subsidy. Extend the subsidy, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that, because I'm going to say they've got to do that. But extending the subsidies, which is hugely popular, doesn't solve the problem. Right, because we can't do it the way... The problem is that, you know, we have, our health care costs are growing all the time. And the reason for that is we're getting older and we demand a lot more care than we've ever demanded. And we're living longer. For example, we make up about 5% of the world's population. We do a third of all the knee replacements in the world. We do a third of all the hip replacements in the world. We do a big percentage of the cataract surgeries in the world. Because these are things that we've all come to expect, and as we get older, that's going to get worse. I mean, let me tell you a quick story about something that happened to us in Memorial Hermann, just to give you an idea of why this situation is so out of control. So a lady shows up in our emergency room, and she's in extreme distress, blood pressure falling, you know, irregular heartbeat looks like she's about to die, okay? So they spend, you know, an hour or so doing triage, and they finally figure out that she has this very rare genetic defect that causes the blood vessel from her heart that goes to the back of your brain, which feeds your brain, is wrapped around her clavicle in a way that is... As the clavicle's grown, it's just gradually pinching that off and it finally got to a critical point where she wasn't getting enough blood flow. So they finally figured this out. Nobody's ever done this surgery, so they've got to figure out how do we go about fixing this. It's so rare. So after a multiple hour surgery, they finally fix it, restore the blood flow to her head. And, you know, and she stabilizes. However, the blood flow has been restricted for so long, she now can't walk, she can't talk. There's all sorts of problems. So we transfer her over to TIR, our rehabilitation hospital. She's there for six months, learning to walk and talk, and she walks out as a normal person after all that's over with. Incredible miracle of modern science. 20 years ago, she had died, and nobody would know anything about it. Showed up in an emergency room, uninsured. I can't even imagine how many millions of dollars it costs to take care of her, which all falls on the hospital, which means they've got to pass that along to insurance and Medicaid and all these other ways that they go about funding this stuff. That is the fundamental problem that we've got to come to wrestle with. And we talk about the fact that we can't afford Medicare for all. But the truth is we already sort of are affording it right now by people walking in the emergency room that are uninsured. So I think we've got to be realistic about what do we expect? What do we want to pay for? What do we want people to pay for themselves? Are we going to require them to take care of themselves? There's a bunch of issues. And right now, all people are screaming their talking points, not talking about the focal. I want to piggyback on what Bill said because I want to make sure our viewers heard that. If you are in an emergency, you don't have to go to Ben Taub or LBJ. You go to an emergency room, you present yourself as an emergency. That hospital has to treat you. They have to. That is a law. So when I heard Harris County lying their asses off about how they we're going to take Hermann Park because people with no insurance could only go to Ben Taub and only go to LBJ, that's a lie. If you are in an emergency, you present yourself in an emergency at a hospital, they must attend to you. You ain't got to drive until you get to one closer to you or whatever. That's where you can get care. Bob, I want to hear from you and then I want to hear from Charles about where you think the Republican conservative movement is going. And whether you would like to see any changes in that direction. Well, as I mentioned earlier, the two wings that are developing, the DeSantis wing and the J.D. Vance wing, are going to try to... Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Defund ICE is the term Democrats use. I won't say she specifically said that, but they said... Fair enough. I just want to make sure that she... I got that. So during a 10-day period in October, ICE arrested 4,017 illegal aliens, the majority of which had violent criminal records, including murderers, child rapists, repeat DWI, felony DWIs, things like that, and also people who have reentered time and time and time again, which is a felony in the United States. So, without... ICE doing that and the hundreds that they're taking off the streets of Houston, hundreds of criminal aliens that they're taking off the streets of Houston every single month, that makes a dramatic impact on local crime. That's not all ICE does. ICE investigates the majority of child pornography trafficking in the United States. ICE investigates the majority of other internet crimes against children and child predators. Tons and tons of different things that all get caught up in this political anti-ICE movement that all go away if you defund ICE. And so do we need to do things maybe differently than have been done in the past? I think so. But when you bring in 15 to 20 million people in a four-year period of time, it took a dramatic action to at least get... A chunk of that back out of the country. They weren't vetting anybody that was coming in during the last four years of this country. They literally weren't even running biometric checks on a lot of them. They would just hand them a piece of paper, say, if you don't mind, when you get to whatever your destination is, would you check yourself in to the nearest immigration court and set yourself up for an asylum hearing? Most of them didn't. And the ones that did, most of them didn't show up. So, We have to fix the problem and neither side wants to fix the problem. Don't you think the country would probably prefer if they wouldn't run people over and break their legs and lie about it and shoot them in the street? That's probably what Sylvia Garcia was talking about. I did. You know, I've watched the video on that and I was horrified when I watched that video. I don't know the facts behind why that happened. And, you know, Sean Teers come out and done an indictment, which probably won't survive a federal challenge. But he did an indictment on it. I don't know what information he used to gather that. It's evidence for the indictment, other than watching a video, because he didn't interview the officer. He didn't interview other people, other than maybe some witnesses, if there were any. I don't know what the facts of that are. It looked horrible. A lot of these things look horrible. A lot of things that police do every day look horrible, but you don't see it because nobody's chasing them around with cameras all over the place. But you do see it on their body cams. Police? Police. Police officers, you know, I watch a lot of cops on TV, and they hit people with cars all the time. You know, they run cars off the road and make them flip and all this kind of stuff and injure other people. All of these things happen every day in the United States, but because ICE does it, and because of the political nature of it, it's blown up out of proportion, and it's... We need to enforce the laws in this country, and we need to respect the people that are doing the law enforcement in this country, whether you agree with them politically. It's like the soldiers coming back from Vietnam. That wasn't their fault, but they were berated and chastised and demeaned. Well, that's totally different. Look, I... It's the same thing, though. When you have political leaders going out and saying, these are not police officers, you don't have to stop when they try to stop you. When you say that these people are... That's not the same as ICE, a job you choose to take and get hired. And that's not the same as a Vietnam veteran that you had to go to a foreign country because your country demanded that you did. That's different. I, look, I heard what you said about ICE, and I absolutely don't believe that you should get rid of any agency until you look at what they do, but the behavior that has been done and shown to the public, them shooting that man in the back of his head while he was on you ain't going to give me no excuse for that. These are people. These are not robots. These are people, and when you say you're going to go after the criminals, but you're going into meatpacking companies, and now the meatpacking companies are like, we ain't got a lot of people. You're going on the farms. They're like, we don't have, you know they're immigrants when you get there, and you're going out. But then when you say you're only going to go after the cartel and the criminals, that's what makes people suspect of your agency. They like that, that, that, that, that ugly woman that was over at Kristi Noem. She said we are going after the criminals of the country at first. Yes. So that's my point. That's why people say what they say. There's no question that Americans and whether rightly or wrongly felt like there was something of a bait and switch that, you know, they were surgically going to go after and get the vast majority of the criminal aliens. And there's been collateral damage. The collateral damage has. made it into the cycles, and what we're seeing in Harris County is that people aren't even voting on local issues, they're voting on national issues. Charles, we haven't heard from you, you've kind of been absorbing this outflow of angst and, you know, I guess analysis, you know, any thoughts? Well, I think the original question was what the future of the party looks like. Is that what you pitched? I mean, again, I don't know. I think there's – I've been talking to a lot of folks lately about what they think is going to happen, either outcome, win or lose. And a lot of people just feel like – I mean, take the Cornyn-Paxton – well, not Cornyn-Paxton, Paxton and Talarico race. A lot of people are kind of assuming that – Taylor here is going to win, and I'm talking about Republicans, and are already putting blame towards Cornyn for remaining in the race to begin with. And so it's not as though they're kind of talking about, well, what can we do? How can we reform the party? No, it's who can we exact revenge on and then kind of keep doubling down. Why didn't the Paxton people get behind the congressman? I mean, you know, if I were in that conversation, I'd say, why didn't you back Wesley Hunt? Well, I think their argument would be that going into that, Paxton was wildly popular among the base, and I think he still is, but is that enough to get him over the edge, and is that enough to... to risk a close race like this. And I think to Bill's point before about, what did you say? It was the Bernie Sanders and the Trump voters. And it's the same thing for Plummer and Paxton. You have the same people on opposite sides. They don't have the same issues. But the same aggravated and aggrieved base, it's the same thing. Even though they're not voting for the same candidate. It's the same people who didn't come back for Parker and Cornyn. These are kind of like an anti-institutional movement against folks who have been in the institution and have upheld them. All five of you are for, in different ways, but I think universally for meritocracy. And we don't reward bad behavior with an elevation to... The nation's, you know, highest deliberative body, the United States. Since when? Since when do we not do that? Look, I agree. Look at who the president is. Hold on. We all make an individual choice. We all make an individual choice about what people have done, how they've conducted themselves, and whether we, as an individual, want them to represent us. I made that choice. We have, we have... I guess documented the serial bad behavior of Ken Paxton on this show for two years and to reward him with a seat in the United States Senate, for me, as an individual voter, was beyond the pale. But look who awarded it to him. The president who has the same character as Paxton. So he made the decision. I hear what you're saying, but look, I mean... History indicates that we don't really hold people accountable. I mean, some people might disagree with this, but we rewarded Sylvester Turner with Congress. We rewarded the lady in the elementary teachers contract with a board seat on HISD. I agree. We do these things. We rewarded Paxton with constant re-elections. We promoted him from Texas. Bennett to, I mean, Texas. Multiple wrongs do not make a right in my mind. I only control one vote, and that is my own. Bill, jump in here. You've heard us talk. I want to go back to immigration for just a second, because we're going to, the middle of December is going to be a fairly momentous moment in this country's history. We get our population estimates in the middle of December for the previous year, ending July 1st. And so, you know, in the last, you know, four, five, six years, something like that, about 80 to 90 percent of our population growth has come from international immigration. You know, the sort of sad thing about our immigration system is so dysfunctional. We don't even know how many people come and leave the country. But the consensus has kind of settled around between two and a half and three and a half million people over the last several years before last year. Last year, it dropped down to about a million, too. The census. Estimates are from July, July, so the census number estimate last year was six months of the Biden administration and six months of the Trump administration and it fell almost exactly by half. Sort of makes sense when you look at the two different policies of the two of the two presidents. Right now, the Census Bureau has a preliminary estimate of about 300,000 people net coming into the country last year. Now we won't have the final number of December, let's just say it's 300. That would be 75% down from last year. It's entirely possible the United States will lose population this year. And what are the ramifications of that? Probably not, but it'll be close. It'll be the lowest amount of population growth we've had in many, many decades. All right. By the way, the state of Texas... It's likely to have a very, very small increase. And if I had to guess, I'd guess Harris County is going to lose population this year. Now, there's a lot of different ramifications of this and a lot of things that need to be thought through on it, which I don't find that we're doing. I mean, I heard, you know, Adrian Garcia got up and said, we're going to be 10 million people in the Houston region by 2050. Ain't going to be close to that. I mean, not close to it. When you look at population, there's three different categories once you get into the local level. You've got births and deaths. We know that number exactly because we can stack up the birth certificate and death certificates and subtract one from the other. There's domestic migration, people that are moving around inside the country. We know that number exactly because the Census Bureau uses tax records and Medicare records to calculate that. And then you've got international migration, which is a wild-ass guess, period, end of story. But what we do know is that for 10 years in a row, more people have moved out of Harris County than have moved into it from inside the United States. Negative domestic migration in Harris County, 10 years in a row. If you total up those 10 years, 300,000 people have moved out of Harris County to someplace else in the United States. Now. A Texas A&M study indicates they didn't go very far. Most of them, about two-thirds of those people, moved outside of Harris County to a surrounding county. somewhere in the greater Houston area Yeah, right. But here's the really important thing about that. So Harris County still grew in population because the people moving out were replaced by international immigrants coming in. The problem is the household income of these people is about three times higher than the household income of these people. And so what we're going to do is let's raise property taxes a bunch. Let's raise water rates at the city of Houston. Let's keep adding more fees and charges to everything and make it even more unaffordable for people to live here when the people coming in are the ones that can least afford it. This is insane. If you were running a business of Harris County, this is not the way you would run it. And so what's going to happen, all you're going to do is accelerate that problem. And at the same time, births are falling in Harris County. Fatalities are going up because we're getting older. I mean, this is a perfect storm of turning us into Detroit, what's going on right now. That's why I'm so beside myself about the $5 trash fee. Thank you. Thank you. I did a kind of op-ed Thank you. Thank you. on Battleground where I talked about the fact that Harris County Democrats, who are notorious for advocating, calling for affordable housing for young people, and then they raise the taxes 41% in three years. How do you think those young people are going to get a mortgage when the mortgage bankers look at their income and say, in addition to the high cost of buying a home and 7% or 8% loan, you're also going to have these higher taxes to contend with? We're hitting you with a rejection stamp. You're not ready to buy a house yet. That is overt hypocrisy in my view. Am I wrong? No, I mean, look, they don't care anything about affordability. I mean, nothing. There's not one policy that Harris County has done during this time since Lina Hidalgo was elected. There's not one policy that makes Harris County more affordable. Not one. And yet I saw ads from at least one commissioner, a county commissioner running for office, saying that she reduced taxes. I saw it. I saw Adrian Garcia chuck the keys to the new house. I want to get affordable houses. I want to go see that house and that family. Yes, I saw that. How did they get chosen over somebody else? Yes, I saw that. And how many of them are there? And who paid for it? I think the most obscene thing we do in Texas property tax is that we tax the increase in value of a house that has nothing to do with somebody's income, has nothing to do with what they can afford, all of that kind of stuff. Your property tax should be based on what you buy the house for. And then when you sell that house, you create some kind of a capital gains tax or something for it for that and tax them on the increased value. And then the tax rates then established for the. There's a number of states that follow that. I'm going to say California do that because that's what my... One of the few things they did right. Yeah. Colorado has a similar system. At a minimum, Bob, I think what we ought to do is limit the increase for homeowners to whatever the inflation rate is. Yeah. Because right now, I mean, I can tell you, my house, when I first got the bill this year, it was up 25%. Yeah. Now, they can't raise it that much because of the 10% circuit breaker. And I ended up going in and fighting with them about it and finally got it reduced. But, you know, the vast majority of people don't do that. And so, but it's the year-over-year increases when you, when you, people forget. When they say they're going to raise taxes by, you know, they're going to raise the tax rate by 8%. But your house goes up by 5%. That's not a 13% increase. It's multiplied on top of each other. And so it has this compounding effect. And that's how you get to 41% increase over three years. I mean, it's just mind-boggling. Okay, what are the ramifications of Abbott's slate of reforms? I, you know, two-thirds vote for any rate increase. Yeah, you can't do that. And what about dropping appraisals from 10% to 3%? I think appraisals to 10% to 3% is a good idea. You can't. Look, I'm a democracy guy. You can't have a two-thirds vote. It's got to be a 50% vote. It ought to be a lot easier to hold the vote. There ought to be a lower threshold for holding the vote. But at the end of the day, what he's talking about here is the only way to replace that revenue is by raising sales tax. And I know this because we've actually been asked by the governor's office to calculate how much the sales tax has to be raised to come up with various levels of property tax relief. So that's what they're really talking about. The problem is... There are also negative consequences from raising the sales tax. It would be a pretty substantial increase in the sales tax. So there's no free lunch here. Well, it's a regressive tax, as you can find, correct? I mean, everybody pays the same. So is property tax, though. I mean, none of the state taxes are very progressive. The great thing about sales tax is everybody pays it. Tourists pay it. Illegal aliens pay it. Criminals pay it. Anybody that's buying something pays the tax, and you can kind of regulate how much tax you pay by how expensive an item. You know, you could buy a, I don't know, a $500 Computer, you can buy a $5,000 computer. Except there are a bunch of exemptions to it. And they manipulate the market with that. And then you have to talk to all the people who live at the Oklahoma border, Louisiana border, the Mexico border, who will just jump over and go buy what they need to come back to. Well, they do that in Chicago. No, no, they do that in Chicago because the cigarettes, I don't smoke, but the cigarettes are cheaper in Chicago than they are in Indiana. But then the people in Chicago come to Indiana to buy liquor. Because for some reason, the tax on liquor is cheaper in Indiana. But I want to go back to the two-thirds majority. Because when the city was proposing to make Riverside a historic district, it wasn't a 50-50. They had to get a supermajority at council in order for it to pass, which I knew I had. And they didn't. And that's why I did not pass. But I don't even say in everything, but I do believe you should have more than a 50%. On some of these approach to change some of these policies. Well, if you have a two-thirds majority for a property tax increase You'll never have another property. It'll never work for me Yeah, but it's not. You can't it's you gotta have some flexibility there, but I'm saying that two-thirds vote with outgoing to the citizens. The other advantage of sales taxes is when there's inflation it also raises the revenue for the state Mr. Bill pointed out earlier. I think it's a better tax improvement about the Sci-Fair bond election. Why is that so significant? Well, this goes back to the discussion we were having about public education. You know, Sci-Fair used to just routinely pass bond elections. All school districts routinely pass bond elections. They pass all the time. They were building a high school every year out there. And all of a sudden, bond elections started failing at a pretty high rate in Texas. Thank you very much. And so this, you know, Cy Fair is a pretty conservative area, although it's not as conservative as it used to be. But they had a... A board takeover, a sort of MAGA, Republicans that went on the school board, they started screwing with the library books and all this kind of stuff. And the people out there in Cy Fair said, that's really not what we signed up for. And so they threw most of those off of the school board, and they returned a more moderate, progressive kind of school board, which ended up deciding that they needed to increase the property tax rate. And this is an increase over the voter approved rate, so you've got to go out for a vote on it. And so it's a pretty big increase. And then you add that on top of the county increase, and it really is going to be onerous. And they have to hold this election in a November election. They used to hold these things in these off elections where, you know, only like the teachers and the principals and stuff went to vote. But now they're having a general election. So this is going to be a real bellwether. I think based on, first of all, how do people feel about property taxes? You know, we know from Mark's poll that 82% of people in Harris County opposed the county's tax rate. So it's going to be interesting to see how people feel about the school tax increase. I think it's also going to speak to some to what the support for public education is generally. But the third thing is, does it have any effect in that Precinct 4? Commissioner's race out there. And in a time when Cy Fair has started decreasing with students. Yeah, enrollment's dropping. They've been on a, the district has been on a hiring freeze all year long and has stopped building schools for the first time in 20 years. They actually, they're actually closing a couple schools out there. So, you know, you have an 80% rejection rate of... In terms of the county taxes, and yet you're going to return both? People don't know. They don't make the connection between the two. That's what we try to do on this show. You need to have your neighbors watch us. There are so many people who show up to city council complaining about their county property taxes or their school district property taxes. It's like, it's like, it's just. It's so frustrating. Dave Martin used to always go on a tangent about it, and now Fred Flickinger does too. But it's like people come up there and complain, and I get it. There's a lot to look at. But if you're going to drive all the way down there, at least know. Oh. There's another really consequential election in Travis County, in the city of Austin, about whether or not to require an efficiency audit like Whitmire did here. They've got a referendum on the ballot to require one for the city of Austin. And it's being, you know, there's a big opposition. Labor unions, you might not be surprised, are opposed to it. You know, all these progressive groups are opposed to it. And, um... You know, they put that tax increase on their ballot here a couple of years ago, and it got voted down three to one almost. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens in Austin on this efficiency audit vote as well. We have a regular resident in rural Texas. What's the world view out there? What do you hear when you go to the coffee shop? We talk about a lot of different things that we talk about here in Harris County, that's for sure. Crime is the big issue. Drugs are rampant all over the state of Texas, but it's a primarily huge topic out there. Psychological services, I rant about this all the time on this show. Texas is the worst state in the country when it comes to psychological services. The Harris County Jail is the largest psychiatric hospital in the state of Texas. In the country. Yeah, it's just, it's obscene and yet the legislature time and time and time again ignores this. If we would actually deal with people's drug addiction problems and deal with people's psychiatric issues, we could reduce crime, we could reduce the cost of law enforcement, the impact... The economic impact of the state would be tremendous, and yet we will not spend the money for it. And, you know, that's why I thought that Patrick would have a bigger hit against him, because he don't want to stop THC. And I know some people, veterans, who they say that really helps them. You know, not deal with drugs and all that, that the THC really helps. But one of our learned tax people, that would be Mr. Bettencourt, just texted me to let me know that we have a 60% threshold for governing bodies in the state of Texas. So I want to share all that with you. So Charles will drive back to his current apartment in the museum. How did I win that $100 bid that I signed? I will suggest he will see at least 15 We've seen homeless people on that drive and when you look at these people, they're just lost. You know, what do we do about that population? Let me get back to why healthcare is so expensive. So this is something I just discovered this week. So when the police encounter someone having a psychotic episode on the street, They take them to an emergency room, and as Tamara correctly pointed out, when they take them to an emergency room, the emergency room can't just kick them out. They've got to clear them for any health issues, or they've wounded themselves, or they're having a heart attack or something, or it's just a psychotic episode. And if it is, then they transfer them to a mental health facility, except that none are available. And so they sometimes will sit in the emergency room for four or five days before a bed becomes available. Now, do you know what it costs to keep somebody in an emergency room for 24 hours? And then, by the way, if somebody walks in from a car wreck and needs to actually be served, and they can't take them because they've got four or five... These are the kind of dysfunctional things going on in our health care system. Go ahead, Bob. Yeah, we've got a client right now who's been ordered to a state mental hospital, and she's been in county jail for five months, and she's still like number 40 or something on the list. And so that is on the county taxpayer's expense, and this poor woman is suffering in the county jail, not getting any help whatsoever, and yet we have no place to pay her. And this is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Sure. If the state would make a real investment in this, it would actually save money throughout all kinds of other systems. And this is one problem I have with the Republicans. They just will not deal with these issues in the state legislature. Well, you brought up homeless. Final 30 seconds. Yes, you brought up the homeless. So, listen, it is Thanksgiving season, and I am helping with the superfeast for the city of Houston. The need is greater than it has ever been. They have more people registered in October than the 31,000 they fed last year. I need all of y'all help. Please go to Citywide Club and please donate. They're going to have donations at banks, boxes, but I need y'all help to feed our people. There's just too much need right now. Bye, everybody. See you next week.