Austin, Texas – Yesterday, Unlocking America’s Future (UAF) responded to a Texas House Committee’s hearing on the impact of Texas’s laws blacklisting firms for responsible investment. Texas retirees and taxpayers are paying the costs resulting from politicizing investment decisions, and are doing so when Texas should be prioritizing the retirement security of its public sector workers.
“Injecting extreme political agendas into pension fund management is a recipe for disaster and puts the financial future of countless Texans at risk,” said Kyle Herrig, spokesperson for Unlocking America’s Future. “Public employees, many of whom aren’t eligible for Social Security, rely heavily on their pensions. It’s imperative that investment decisions are guided by sound fiduciary principles and not a thirst to score cheap political points.”
Key Highlights from Yesterday’s Hearing:
- The Law Is as Confusing as It Is Costly and Dumb
- Comptroller Glenn Hegar, who is responsible for maintaining Texas’s business blacklist, either could not or refused to specify how financial firms could be removed from the list.
- Legislators were not provided clear answers as to what merits inclusion on the list in the first place, as several of the blacklisted firms are heavily invested in Texas’s own oil and gas industry.
- The law’s proponents, notably a representative from a right-wing think tank, refused to acknowledge the various reports citing the hundreds of millions more that Texas taxpayers are paying for no meaningful benefit.
- Real People Are Caught in the Political Crossfire
- As the hearing drew a close, a retired Houston-area public school teacher was brought up to testify.
- Though she was fully vested and eligible to retire in 2020, she taught for an additional year to support her students and campus during the pandemic. In the years since retiring from her 30-plus-year career, she has not received a single cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to her Teacher Retirement System (TRS) pension.
- She shared that her retired colleagues are struggling with health issues, unable to afford premiums or medication, and some have had to move in with family due to financial strain.
- Texas has not provided a permanent, automatic COLA for retirees in the face of rising inflation. She criticized anti-responsible lending laws: “Finally, I’m deeply concerned about proposals restricting TRS from working with firms that consider ESG factors in investments. Pension funds should prioritize maximizing returns, securing our retirement, and keeping costs low for taxpayers, not politics.”
For more information and to read our full report on the impacts of hard costs of political extremism, please visit Textremism.com.
