(The Center Square) – Gov. Greg Abbott on Saturday signed Texas’ first school choice bill into law.

Abbott signed “the largest day one school choice program in the United States of America,” he said surrounded by children and state lawmakers.

“Today is the culmination of a movement that has swept across our state and across our country,” Abbott said. “A movement driven by parents … who wanted a better education option” for their children, describing examples. One was mother Hillary Hickland, “who was angry that a woke agenda was being forced on her daughter in a public school and that drove her to run for and win a seat in the Texas legislature,” he said. Abbott endorsed and campaigned for Hickland, who was in attendance at the signing.

“The movement was driven by activists and public policy advocates across the state fueled by a vision for an education system that levels the playing field for parents and expands opportunity for our great children,” Abbott continued. “A movement driven by families who shared my vision – that it is time that we put our children on a pathway to having the number one ranked education system in the United States of America knowing that school choice is part of the formula of achieving that mission.”

He also said he’s traveled across the state “talking about school choice for more than half a decade and … met with thousands of families who have longed for education freedom. These families, and thousands more, have been yearning to choose a school that best fits their child. Now they have that option.”

When Abbott ran for reelection in 2022, he “promised school choice for the families of Texas,” he said. “Today, we delivered on that promise.”

The bill creates the state’s first Education Savings Account program to provide taxpayer-funded subsidies for primarily low-income families of roughly $10,000 per student.

Both the Texas Senate and House budgets allocate $1 billion for the program to support roughly 100,000 students, prioritizing low-income and special needs students, The Center Square reported. The savings accounts can be used by parents to send their children to the school of their choice, including private schools.

For more than 20 years, Democrats and Texas House Republicans have opposed a taxpayer-funded subsidy to allow families to send their child to a private school of their choice, arguing funds would be taken away from public schools and that taxpayer money should not fund private school education.

While the Texas Senate has passed a bill creating an Education Savings Account for several legislative sessions in a row, the bill always died in the Republican-controlled House – until now.

The tide turned after Abbott campaigned for 16 House Republican candidates who challenged incumbents who opposed a bill he championed in the last legislative session. Another five Republicans who opposed the bill didn’t run for reelection last year. Abbott’s endorsed Republican challengers won their primaries and runoff elections, vowing to vote for the state’s first ESA program.

The tide also turned after the Texas House elected a new speaker, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, who vowed that the ESA bill would pass the House, which it did on April 17. Burrows also traveled with Abbott statewide promoting the bill, pledging multiple times on social media that it would pass, The Center Square reported.

Burrows thanked members of the Texas House for voting for the bill, saying, “they knew school choice was the moral thing to do. They knew it was the right thing to give children opportunities to go to the place that it’s in their best interest. They knew it was the principled thing to do, that competition makes all things better. That is what America was founded upon. I do believe the work is not done. We have to make sure this is not only the biggest school choice [program] in history but the best.”

(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has introduced another bill to help families save money without tax penalties. He previously introduced a bill to expand tax-deferred education savings plans and another to create Education Savings Accounts for military families, The Center Square reported.

Now, he’s introduced the Universal Savings Account Act to allow American families to save without the restrictions and penalties associated with traditional tax advantaged accounts.

“A simple and accessible incentive savings plan will provide families with a way to establish financial security and prosperity. This bill provides a straightforward solution to those challenges,” he said.

The bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to create Universal Savings Accounts (USAs). The bill defines USAs as a trust into which cash is deposited or withdrawn. It would restrict initial contributions to $10,000, allowing the amount to increase by $500 every year, before capping at $25,000 per calendar year.

The bill would exempt distributions from gross income and taxation. It also wouldn’t limit contributions based on income and allow for inflation adjustments. It would prohibit funds from being comingled with other property or from being invested in life insurance, according to the bill language.

U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., introduced companion legislation in the U.S. House. She described the bill as “commonsense,” saying it will “empower Americans to take control of their financial futures.”

The bill “cuts through red tape and gives every American a flexible, tax-free way to save, invest, and spend – without government interference or penalties,” she said.

According to a Tax Foundation analysis, most types of savings put Americans at a disadvantage because the money is subject to double taxation through income tax. People who save for emergencies, to buy a home, start a family or business, or for any other reason are subjected to their savings being taxed after they’ve already paid income tax on their earnings.

“Current tax-advantaged savings options are overly complex and restrictive,” the foundation argues. USAs, by contrast, “are tax-advantaged savings vehicles with unrestricted use of funds, allowing participants to save for any reason without penalty or excessive paperwork.”

It also argues that USAs would benefit low-income households by enabling them to save, which contributes to upward mobility.

“Over the long run, the most effective and sustainable way to improve financial security and upward mobility is through policies that lead to greater household saving and wealth accumulation at all levels of income,” the foundation says. “However, the current federal tax code generally discourages saving, since the income tax applies once to wages and then again to the return on wages that are saved. By contrast, there is no additional tax on wages that are consumed rather than saved. To offset this effect, the tax code contains a patchwork of preferences for saving with complicated rules that generally benefit higher-income households.”

Creating USAs would over “the long run, effectively exempt from taxation most investment income that is earned by low- and middle-income households, boosting saving substantially among these households.”

If passed and signed into law, the bill would be “a win for working families, a win for personal freedom, and a win for financial independence,” Harshbarger said.

(The Center Square) – California Democratic legislators gutted a bill that would have made it a felony to solicit any children for sex, despite support for the measure from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis. 

Assembly Bill 379, a bipartisan bill from Assemblywoman Maggy Krell, D-Sacramento, and State Sen. Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, would have closed the loopholes left open by the forced amendments to Grove’s Senate Bill 1414, which passed last year and made it a felony to pay all minors for sex except for those 16 and 17 years old. 

National outrage on the bill’s near-shelving put the bill back onto the legislative schedule, and led Newsom and Kounalakis to come out in support of the bill’s existing provisions. 

However, Assembly Public Safety Chairman Nick Schultz, D-Burbank, has instead opted “to host info hearings on the issue in the fall” as Democratic legislators voted to forcefully gut the bill against Krell’s wishes to remove the provision making it a felony to purchase sex from all minors.

Republicans responded by proposing a “hostile” amendment to restore the provision, which Krell officially endorsed, saying she does not consider the restoration amendment “hostile” and would be voting to support it. 

In one notable exchange on the Assembly floor session on AB 379, Assemblyman Mark Gonzalez, D-Los Angeles, took aim at Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego for his support of making it a felony to buy sex from children.

“SB 357, which this bill is trying to fix, legalized loitering for the purpose of sex work and prostitution. Why? Because somehow it was spun as anti-LGBT to try and enforce laws against sex trafficking,” said DeMaio on the Assembly floor. “I will tell you as a gay Republican it is offensive, and a supermajority of the gay community disavow the LGBTQ caucus claiming that somehow this bill is anti-gay. It’s offensive to use the gay community as window dressing for sex trafficking.”

“What’s offensive is when you stand on this floor and call yourself gay, but yet you vote down the same civil rights for gay people every single day,” said Gonzalez.

SB 357 author State Sen. Scott Wiener argued at the time that decriminalization of loitering to commit prostitution “contributes to “discrimination on the basis of gender, race, class and perceived sex worker status – in particular, targeting Black women and members of the transgender community.”

Since SB 357 has come into law, vast swathes of urban areas in California have become open prostitution zones. In Los Angeles, a 40 block area of South Central is covered by hundreds of prostitutes, some charging as little as $40 for some acts, with “10 girls on the corner, condoms on the ground,” many of whom are minors, all in “broad daylight.” 

Sacramento Sheriff Jim Cooper, who previously was a Democratic Assemblyman, condemned the changes to the bill, and cited his department’s high volume of cases regarding the sex trafficking of minors. 

“In my agency, we currently have 17 open cases of juveniles being trafficked for sex. This year, we have already rescued seven juveniles from the sex trade,” said Cooper. “They are currently getting sexually exploited, and the Legislature made a decision today that the exploitation of these children is acceptable collateral damage.”