The Texas culture of corruption

Showed for me. TLDR

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TLDR

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Lobbyist gives senator language to drop in to a bill allowing use tax and property tax breaks for building affordable housing.

Company that Lobbyist works for (plus others) uses loophole in said bill to build lots of apartments that get massive tax breaks despite them being anything but affordable.

State senator has no recollection of it.

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I would venture the vast majority of legislation is written “off site”.

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yes. it also redirects the power congress holds to the bureaucracies. the law says the department of X will determine the specifics of the law, which is why anything scored by the CBO is bullshite.

we're governed by the largely arbitrary CFR, not by our leaders.

Only fools believe in political parties, my point is about the access and power of lobbyists. How do we fix it? Ban lobbying?

I often wonder what the country would look like without lobbyists. On the surface, it sees like lobbyists hurt things more than they help. But they do provide protections for the common good at times as well. I think our second amendment would have been obliterated to hell without the NRA. I don't always agree with the NRA's position on things, but in the end, they have played a critical role in keeping our gun rights in tact.

I could write a novel about the Texas craft beer scene. Andrews and Ben E Kieth are the two big lobbyist organizations in Texas and they write their own laws that discourage businesses from brewing at will and keep their margins healthy.

These people make me feel like the pauper. Which I guess I am.

I have experienced "Texan" corruption first hand. While there is corruption everywhere, the Texan variety is interesting to me because it is so very antithetical to the Louisiana variety.

In Texas, it's all about getting ahead to tear down other people. You slip a little money to so and so to spread rumors about a competitor, you get permits pulled from someone else. The idea is to tear others down to build you up. Texans see their fellow man as the opponent.

In Louisiana, people collude and form syndicates that protect each other. In Louisiana, it's all about cheating the rules to advance the group, not destroying another group to get ahead. Louisianians see their fellow man as themselves, and view the system itself as the opponent.

This cultural divide is never more evident than in college classrooms. Talk to any professor at a university with large populations of Louisiana and Texas students and they'll tell you the same story. The Louisiana students steal the answers to the test and share them with their study group of close friends to all get ahead. The Texas student pretends to steal the answers to the test and then distributes the wrong answers to their fellow classmates so that they do poorly by comparison. The Texans see their classmates as the opponent, so they compete to get ahead of each other. The Louisiana students see the teacher and the school itself as the opponent, so they constantly attempt to use and undermine the system to get ahead.

Texans Compete.

Louisianians collude.

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I know one man who is a lobbyist. I don’t even know for what. I envy him. He lives a life of a straight up BAW. His home is ridiculous. His perks are ridiculous. His deer lease is ridiculous because he gets dibs on state land that the general public has no access to

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I know a bunch, most aren't well paid and it's very heavily regulated. Big bucks come with a major client and/or a large number of clients.
Their pay is public record.

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In Texas, it's all about getting ahead to tear down other people. You slip a little money to so and so to spread rumors about a competitor, you get permits pulled from someone else. The idea is to tear others down to build you up. Texans see their fellow man as the opponent.

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That is such horseshite.