Tag: texas

Posted on

Ukraine Philanthropy Part II – Using Airline Miles

I wrote recently that helping Ukrainian people survive and resist the Russian invasion is the most philanthropically worthy project I can think of right now. But a key question remains: How can I help?

I found a surprisingly easy and satisfying way last week, through an organization called Safe Passage 4 Ukraine. 

They accept donations of hotel miles, credit card reward points, and airline miles. If you only have a small number of saved miles, the organization can aggregate donations from many people to purchase travel or hotel stays for refugees from the war zone.

Their online form is very easy to use.

For small amounts of miles in airlines I rarely fly, I filled out their form with my pledge, then clicked a button, and the website took me to my own airline miles account. From there, once logged in, I clicked the charity to complete the transfer of miles. The charity then sent me a confirmation email, asking me to click once more to confirm the transfer. Less than 5 minutes of “work” at my desk. Easy peasy.

SP4U

JetBlue’s minimum donation is 500 miles. I really can’t use my roughly 2,000 miles with them so I donated them. United Airlines’ minimum is 1 thousand miles. I pledged the roughly 2,500 miles I had. 

The Most Satisfying Thing

Then I did an even cooler thing. Although I only had a few JetBlue and United Airline points, I travel American Airlines more frequently. I had accumulated a little over 50 thousand miles at the beginning of last week.

Shortly after I pledged to donate at least 30 thousand of those points, a travel specialist from Safe Passage 4 Ukraine requested over email for me to stand by, as he’d be sending me further details shortly.

With at least 30 thousand American Airlines to pledge I became eligible to purchase a transatlantic flight for an individual Ukrainian refugee.

Two days later, on a Friday afternoon, my assigned travel specialist sent me an individual’s profile, just as promised. It was a Ukrainian woman’s name, her birthdate, and a specific multi-city flight plan – Warsaw to London (Heathrow) to Philadelphia to Orlando, with flight numbers and times. The specialist had already worked out that this one-way transatlantic flight could be purchased with my 30,000 miles, plus $96.15 from me. Very affordable. By the time this column goes to print, she will have arrived in Orlando.

Incidentally, I don’t know about you, but whenever I try to book my own travel with my miles I find I never have quite enough. If I have 25 thousand miles, my flight requires 50 thousand. If I have 50 thousand, my flight needs 90 thousand. I feel like it costs 50 thousand miles just to go from San Antonio to Dallas and back, whenever I search for it myself. To my delight, booking this ticket for a stranger to fly out of Warsaw to Orlando actually cost exactly what the Safe Passage 4 Ukraine travel specialist told me it would cost. Somehow, they found a 4-city transatlantic flight for 30 thousand miles, plus $96.15. 

Actually, initially I had a problem when I went to book it and I found I couldn’t get the flights for less than 79 thousand miles. Then I realized that I’d mistakenly searched for a round trip ticket. I’d forgotten to book just the one-way flight. Right. The Ukrainian refugee just needs to get away right now. She isn’t looking for the round trip yet. 

So Who Gets Safe Passage?

I spoke last week with Rachel Jamison, the founder and Director of Safe Passage 4 Ukraine. Jamison says her organization has flown 505 Ukrainians overseas, fleeing the war. They have flown or housed (with hotel points) 41 injured volunteers. They have flown 39 wounded soldiers receiving prosthetics.

Rachel_Jamison
Rachel Jamison, SP4U founder

They have aggregated 17 million airline miles and approximately 2 million hotel points. Because they mostly work with points and miles, their actual financial donations have remained small, an estimated $350 thousand to date.

By day, Jamison is a law professor working for New York University based in the United Arab Emirates. We spoke by Zoom despite the 10 hour time difference. With an all-volunteer organization, she retains her full time job. “I’ve been in a lot of tough places,” she says, “but [Ukraine] is the hardest environment.”

“I come in as an atypical person, not from Ukraine. But this is what I’m most proud of, professionally. Safe Passage 4 Ukraine is also atypical, in that it involves Ukrainians working in partnership with foreigners, and military folks working with civilians. That’s very rare.”

Because they have many more people trying to flee the war than they can serve, their partners on the ground in Ukraine asses criteria for safe passage flights, which are a combination of 

1. A safe landing destination, 

2. Legality, and

3. Need

To determine a safe destination, Jamison says the “most common thing is people have family in the US or Canada, and they need to be reunited with them.” This is especially true as most people they help are women, and women with children.

Ukraine_refugees
SP4U mostly helps women and women with children

Next, their partners on the ground in Ukraine do assessment of their legal status.

“Every person we help move to the United States or Canada has a documented legal right to move, and has a sponsor when they arrive, usually a family member,” explains Jamison.

And then finally, there’s the prioritization of the most needy. “There’s an overall needs assessment that starts with: ‘if we don’t help this person, what will happen?’ All of them have been through things that you and I have never experienced,” Jamison continued. “So we are drawing the line at who really needs our help.” 

That often means the recipients of the flights are ill and in need of treatment, or they are people traumatized by bombing or Russian occupation. In the next phase of the war – which may mean towns newly liberated from the Russian army – Jamison expects a huge uptick in people desperate for help. 

“Right after Kharkiv was liberated [in September 2022] there were suddenly many people with serious needs. We are going to need everything we can get.”

An SP4U volunteer

Chris Schools is an ex-marine with operations experience who lives north of Dallas (Celina, TX). He has known Jamison from before she went to law school. Schools deployed to Afghanistan 2010-2011 with the marines as an ordinance specialist but has been out of the military since 2011. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he knew he wanted to help, but asked himself how? 

I asked him whether he considered going to Ukraine? “It runs through your head, but with a 6 and a 3 year-old now, my life is different. I can’t be going into combat zones.”

Instead, when he heard about what Jamison was doing, he reached out online and asked he how he could help. As he told me, “nobody is more action-oriented than Rachel, in everything she does. It was very easy for me to get bought in and know we were on a worthy mission.”

In April 2022 he volunteered to work on partnership outreach, and then extended his work to helping, along with others, to set up their financial systems, managing their PayPal account for incoming donations, as well as making disbursements for example to reimburse partners inside of Ukraine. 

As a logistics guy with a background in working in a complicated war zone, Schools was effusive in praising what Jamison created in a short time. “The organization is unique in that they found a way to give back that hadn’t been done. Anybody can say they need money, but they put together a complicated system in a manageable way, to be innovative and move quickly.”

The Appeal

This charity really appeals to me. I had an extra spare resource – airline miles – that I’ve traditionally found difficult to use. Safe Passage 4 Ukraine did the hard work to find and vet the person from a war zone who most needed them. They found the exact flight on the exact day that could serve her needs. All I had to do was book it with my miles under her name and personal information. They did the rest. 

I don’t know any of the back story of the woman whose ticket I purchased with my airline miles, only that she was from Mykolaiv, a previously Russian-occupied but now Ukrainian-liberated city. That’s all I need to know. 

Without this organization as a matchmaker, I would have virtually no way to personally help an individual in the Ukrainian war zone. I found it very emotionally satisfying doing my small part to help remove one person, desperate to get out of a war, to a safer place in the United States.

Here’s the link again to pledge miles.

A version of this post ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle.

Please see related post

Ukraine Philanthropy I – A Scrappy Group

Post read (69) times.

Posted on

The Chapter 313 Monster Revives in Texas

You know how in the final minutes of your favorite horror movie, when our plucky heroes kill the beast with a desperate last ditch effort, and the beast goes down, to everyone’s surprise? And then the camera zooms in on the exhausted survivors leaning on one another, only to have a shadow of the beast rise up, unseen, behind them?

“No!” we shout at the screen. “Look up! It’s still alive!”

That’s the call I got last earlier this year from members of a left/right coalition which managed to help – to everyone’s surprise – kill a terrible corporate welfare program called Chapter 313 at the end of the last legislative session, in May 2021.

The Monster Revives!

They are sounding the alarm over proposed rule changes by the Texas Comptroller’s office which they claim will harm transparency and allow the monster – Chapter 313 tax breaks – to rise up, back from the dead.

As of now, the program is set to expire at the end of 2022. In the light of that upcoming expiration, the Texas Comptroller’s office has proposed a change in reporting requirements for the program. 

The Comptroller’s office responded to my query about the changes, asserting that rule changes are meant to respond to the sunsetting of the program, to streamline reporting, to eliminate bad tax valuation data, and that it is following an established procedure for consulting stakeholders in the program. 

So what are critics worried about?

The fiendish Chapter 313 is a tad complicated, but let’s review the basics. A private company (often an energy company, but not always) wants to build a new thing in Texas. It presents a ( fake, according to a Hearst investigation and academic studies) threat that it might build the thing in some other state, so it needs tax incentives like a break on school property taxes in order to invest in Texas.

I say fake because in 85 percent of cases, the companies would have built their thing in Texas without the incentive, according to a report by UT professor Nathan Jensen, a long-time critic of the Chapter 313 program.

So it’s a pure private giveaway to incentivize a company to do the thing it would have done anyway. And you’re paying for it.

Here’s how you’re paying. A local school board approves a 10 year property tax break to build the thing in Texas. This could be worth merely hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax breaks to the company, but for big companies it can be worth tens of millions of dollars over ten years. A database currently maintained by the Comptroller lets you see how much and for how long companies get this incentive.

The Texas Comptroller’s office needs to approve new deals, but historically has given approval in 97.5 percent of cases. So that, in practice, has not been a real check and balance on Chapter 313. 

Part of the evil genius of the program is that the state wholly reimburses the local school district for its 10-years of foregone tax revenue, so school districts almost never say no. And when I say “the state” provides reimbursement, I mean ultimately you, dear taxpayer, reimburse the private company for building the thing it was already going to build in the first place. 

This became such a successful private corporate welfare game using public dollars that by March 2021 there were over 500 active Chapter 313 agreements, and the cost of the program reached over $10 billion in state funds. 

Even with the program currently sunsetted, a gold rush of sorts is currently underway – mostly by energy companies – to apply for the sweet, sweet tax subsidies. The Comptroller’s office website shows 123 new applications submitted in 2021 alone, with more no doubt to come in the year to come.

So here’s where we are in the horror movie, in December 2021. A coalition of both left and right-oriented think tanks had worked closely with a bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic to raise awareness of the Chapter 313 problems, which helped kill it last Spring.

But Doug Greco, lead organizer for Central Texas Interfaith in Austin, said the Comptroller’s rule changes are a prelude to reviving the subsidy, by limiting the public and press’s access to data in the future. “We are under no illusions that there will be an attempt to bring Chapter 313 back in the next legislative session,” says Greco. 

Among the proposed changes would be a decreased requirement to estimate the total value of projects, the number of jobs created, and the end of a centralized database of local school district tax breaks. Each of these elements made it possible in the past for legislators to study the effectiveness of the program. 

Bob Fleming, a leader with The Metropolitan Organization in Houston, a coalition of churches, sees an intentional plan to revive the subsidy program by keeping the public less informed. “Make no mistake, Comptroller Hegar intends to subvert the will of the legislature,” claimed Fleming during a press conference on the issue.

The Comptroller’s stated reason – per its website – for changing disclosure requirements is to “bring the Chapter 313 reporting into the digital age by making access by the public simpler and reducing the burden on school districts and agreement holders.” 

Opportunities for public comment on the Comptroller’s proposed rule changes ended December 19. 

The Comptroller’s Communications Director Chris Bryan meanwhile responded that “The agency is committed to making changes in a collaborative way that provides the legislature and the public the information they need to make informed decisions regarding the manner in which tax dollars are spent.”

In the light of the current surge underway of new applications before the end of 2022 deadline, the rationale for “winding down” reporting requirements is odd. Chapter 313 subsidies continue for 10 years at a time, so reporting less information until 2032 doesn’t seem to serve the public interest. 

Personally, I was stunned to see Chapter 313 go down in the last legislative session. It was the ideal example of a concentrated private financial benefit understood by insiders (tax attorneys, energy lobbyists) with a diffuse and poorly understood burden paid by the general public (that’s you and me, baby.) Sadly, treating uninformed taxpayers like mushrooms – feed them manure, keep them in the dark – usually works. 

Let’s hope the Comptroller’s office pays attention to recent public comments. We need that office to shine a light on this monster in the dark, as it attempts to stand up after being left for dead.

A version of this post ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle

Post read (80) times.

Posted on

DeLorean’s Legacy

August was a big month for the DeLorean car company’s legacy. In fact, August 18 was a particularly big day on both coasts. On the west coast, San Antonio-based DeLorean Motors Reimagined hosted a public launch of its “Alpha5” concept car at the 70th Annual 2022 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance auto show. 

Meanwhile on August 18 in New Hampshire, an alternate claim to the DeLorean legacy was announced as well. Kathryn DeLorean, original founder John Z. DeLorean’s daughter, launched the DeLorean Legacy Project, an educational engineering center with plans to build a signature tribute car, the Model JZD, first designed by Angel Guerra in 2020.

One of these is a for-profit business and the other is a historical tribute and non-profit educational project. Both are attempts to grapple with what this car brand meant in the past and what it will mean in the future. What is DeLorean’s true legacy?

Ever since its star turn in the famous Michael J. Fox movie, the DeLorean brand has operated in the boundary space between the past and the future. Any DeLorean project wrestles with this fact. A DeLorean-branded car is by definition a 40-year-old throwback while simultaneously marketing itself as a blast into the future.

The DeLorean of our imagination embodies this paradox. A retro-futuristic relic of discontinuous-time and liminal space.

The DeLorean Motors Reimagined folks know this. The name “Alpha5” – the prototype they debuted last week at Pebble Beach – uses “5” in the name because the company claims to have imagined 1990, 2000, 2010 DeLoreans (the Alphas 2, 3 and 4) that never were. That’s a cool made-up retconned legacy idea, actually. 

Alpha5
The Alpha5, Fifth of It’s Name?

Their signature tagline, “The Future Was Never Promised” to me sounds somewhat apologetic, as if anticipating and then responding to a disappointed fan who objects to their vision of the future for DeLorean.

Unfortunately, or maybe inevitably, it’s proving hard to satisfy the hardcore fandom that wants both retro and futuristic styling. So far it’s gone over about as well as did Hayden Christiansen’s Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels, as compared to the original Darth Vader narratives, another retconned remake that enraged original superfans.

The Delorean Motors Reimagined Instagram page hosts a relentless series of complaints about the Alpha5: that it’s not a real DeLorean, that it very clearly reused a 2019 design for a concept car called the DaVinci, that it looks like a Tesla, and that they didn’t honor the DeLorean design legacy. To satisfy your own schadenfreude, I invite you to visit their social media.

Davinci Car
The DaVinci Concept Car from ItalDesign

The most immediate challenge to their future business hit the company a week before Pebble Beach. Electric car company Karma Motors sued DeLorean Motors Reimagined and its top executives for stealing intellectual property and breaching the non-disclosure agreements they signed as Karma employees in 2021. For them to have a future, they will need to go back to address this past, in court.

Other fights over intellectual property

As one dives deeper into the obsessions of the DeLorean fandom online, the questions of intellectual property rights and legitimacy get even more convoluted. By the time it publicly launched in 2022, the San Antonio-based DeLorean Motors Reimagined had already teamed up in a joint venture with Delorean Motor Company of Texas, based in Humble. That company, led by Stephen Wynne, had long ago established itself as the successor to John Z. DeLorean’s bankrupted firm by buying up DeLorean parts and then over time acquiring lapsed trademark rights to the name, logo and design. 

Sally Baldwin DeLorean, the administrator for John Z. DeLorean’s estate and his fourth wife at the time of his death in 2005, however, sued DeLorean Motor Company of Texas for improper use of intellectual property in 2014 and again in 2018. That case was settled in 2018 for an undisclosed amount, leaving DeLorean Motor Company of Texas in a strong position to claim intellectual property rights to the DeLorean name, brand, imagery and logo. Rights which it has now shared in a joint venture with DeLorean Motors Reimagined.

John DeLorean’s daughter Kathryn and a fan-favorite design

Kathryn DeLorean, JZD’s daughter, believes that Sally cheated on her father and also cheated her out of proceeds of her late father’s estate. Meanwhile, she has embarked on her own attempt to establish a DeLorean legacy, by working with a fan-friendly designer.

In November and December 2020, freelance automobile designer Angel Guerra of Spain launched a COVID-era fantasy idea: A 2021 DeLorean tribute to the 40th anniversary of the car. 

In the online super fandom of DeLorean, Angel Guerra’s designs caught spontaneous fire. In Guerra’s telling, he reached out to Delorean Motor Company of Texas and shared his vision and even business plans for building a prototype within a year. When DeLorean Motor Company of Texas declined to pursue the idea, Guerra returned to his regular day job, working on European hyper-car auto designs. 

Guerra was then surprised to hear a few months later that in fact DeLorean Motor Company of Texas was pursuing a new futuristic electric car joint venture. This turned out to be a group from Karma Motors that formed the executive team of DeLorean Motors Reimagined in San Antonio. Guerra’s comment to me on the formation of that venture, just a few months after he pitched Stephen Wynne of DeLorean Motor Company of Texas, was “what a coincidence.”

Guerra subsequently joined forces with Kathryn DeLorean to offer another kind of legacy. They hope students of design and engineering will learn from building his concept car, the “Model JZD.”

Angel Guerra and Kathryn DeLorean are careful in their public communications to disclose that the DeLorean Legacy Project is not affiliated with DeLorean Motors Reimagined (of San Antonio) or DeLorean Motor Company, Texas (of Humble).

They are not competing in any commercial sense. They represent a different claim, however, to the fandom of the DeLorean. In launching her legacy project, Kathryn says “There is no competition, I am a DeLorean, I’m making engineers, not engines.”  

Now then, let’s go back to the future. Ten years from now, Whose legacy will we remember? Obviously, I don’t know. 

But there’s a recurring pattern with this company. Kathryn DeLorean claims she was cheated out of her estate by her step-mother Sally Baldwin DeLorean. Sally Baldwin DeLorean claimed she was cheated out of intellectual property and royalties by Stephen Wynne’s company. Karma Motors feels cheated out of intellectual property by the executive team of DeLorean Motors Reimagined. Guerra feels cheated out of credit and inspiration by Wynne. Online superfans feel cheated out of DeLorean’s legacy by the new designs. And I’m worried about the public being cheated out of up-to-$1 million in city and county subsidies offered to DeLorean Motors Reimagined, a pure startup with no track record, entering an extremely difficult industry.

A version of this post ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle.

Post read (109) times.

Posted on

Social Security – The 50 Year View

In the beginning of June, Social Security issued its annual Summary Report  noting that the primary trust fund for paying reserves will run out in 2034. Twelve years.

Sample Social Security Card
Whoops now I’ve doxxed Mr. Public

Also, I was reading this past week a book by Peter Ferrera published in 1980 called Social Security: The Inherent Contradiction.

In 1980, Ferrera forecast the trust fund would run out in 2030, to which I have two reactions. First – that’s some amazingly accurate forecasting of a complex actuarial system over the span of 50 years! Well done, actuaries. Second – you Boomers have had at least 42 years to fix this. Like, what the heck? I am first eligible for Social Security retirement payments in that same year, 2034. Coincidence? I’m a Gen X kid, I’m used to this kind of treatment by now. It’s fine. Really. I’m fine.

More seriously, the real thing we should understand about the trust fund is this: It’s a useful fiction. 

The trust fund isn’t particularly important. 

Benefits get paid from current Social Security payroll taxes. The government is not actually investing our dollars. Technically, yes, a partial and temporary surplus of payroll taxes gets parked in low-interest Treasurys, but by no means is this the real source of our Social Security payments.  It’s a pay-as-you-go system. Current workers pay for past workers.

In fact, understanding this is a fiction is the key to remaining calm about Social Security. Rather than panic, we should take comfort. The trust fund has never particularly mattered.

As Ferrera wrote in 1980, the idea itself of a trust fund is “a carefully contrived deception meant to mislead the public.”

Ferrera continued, “the entire purpose of this deception is to hide the welfare elements in the social security system and attempt to create the impression that social security is simply insurance without any welfare elements.” I agree. 

Whenever I write about Social Security I receive panicked (or conversely, overly certain) emails asking – or informing – me about the Ponzi scheme underlying our biggest government program. This is neither true nor helpful. Ponzi schemes are not backed by mandatory payroll taxes. Social Security is. 

I 100 percent do not worry about Social Security running out of money. It’s never been a true trust fund. Rather, it has always been primarily “pay as you go,” transferring tax dollars from current workers to current retirees.

Ferrara’s big idea from 1980 was that Social Security has two functions, insurance and welfare. Most Americans focus on the insurance aspect, in which they think they pay into the system during their working years and they think they get a return on investment back in retirement years. That insurance function is the fakery, and the trust fund a symbolic misdirection to assist in the legerdemain. The true function of Social Security is a welfare transfer.

Although I haven’t spoken with Ferrera, I’m certain we disagree on whether the welfare element is good. I think it is. He thinks it is not.

A not-sufficiently-understood aspect of Social Security benefits is that it deeply favors modest lifetime incomes over higher incomes, when it comes to benefits. This is partly accomplished through “bend points,” which mean Social Security pays based on 90 percent of an extremely modest lifetime salary, 32 percent of a medium lifetime salary, and only 15 percent of higher earnings. I’m simplifying the language around these “bend points,” but the idea is that the welfare benefit of Social Security favors the neediest. To match this focus on welfare, annual income above a certain amount ($147K in 2022) is not taxed for Social Security.

I am confident that in my own life, under reasonable assumptions, I would have achieved a greater net worth if I had never been taxed for Social Security and instead had invested those funds myself. The “welfare” part of Social Security will turn out to be a net loss for me, personally. 

For most of my fellow citizens however, the welfare benefit of Social Security is a net gain. And that’s fine by me. This is socialism and should be understood as such. 

I say that not as a diss of Social Security. In fact, ninety-six percent of adults polled consider Social Security an important government program. I mean to point out to a Texas readership with all of its preconceptions that a little bit of socialism can be pretty comfortable. Very popular and indeed, necessary. Not having elderly people die of starvation for example is a win in my book.

As for Social Security staying solvent, the real key is in understanding that this is solved with just a series of technocratic tax rule adjustments. The issue is not running out of money in the trust fund (again, the trust fund is largely irrelevant) but rather what small adjustments to delay and diminish benefits or boost taxes will be made to render the entire system solvent.

That was addressed in another 1980s throwback way this past week by former Senator Rudy Boschwitz (R-MN). 

While serving in the Senate (1978 to 1990), Boschwitz had written a key memo in 1982 with proposals for shoring up the program. Yes, it is clear folks were worried back in the 80s about the issue.

Last week, in the Wall Street Journal, he listed the various ways to do it again. 

Raise the “full” retirement age to beyond 67.

Raise the “early” retirement age to beyond 62.

Fiddle with the “bend points” so that payments are even less generous to higher earners.

Slow the rise in benefits by linking to a different, probably better, inflation index.

Slow the rise in benefits for higher earners.

Make inflation adjustments less frequently.

Tax Social Security income more heavily for higher earners.

Raise the payroll tax slightly to bring in more revenue.

This can all be phased in with many years’ lead time, in a boring, technocratic way. No need to panic. Which again is why I don’t worry about the so-called trust fund running out of money in 2034.

Big thanks to reader Steven Alexander who contributed data and analysis to Ferrera’s 1980 book, crunching numbers on computers back in the 1970s that accurately modeled things like return on investment and the end of the trust fund in the 2030s. I was reading his copy signed by the author.

A version of this ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle.

Please see related posts

My nerdy Social Security Spreadsheet, Part I

My nerdy Social Security Spreadsheet, Part 2

Post read (164) times.

Posted on

TPR Podcast Episode #1: I Had No Idea How Hard It Would Be

After years of trying to launch a proper podcast with proper professional help…a milestone unlocked for me! The first episode is titled “I Had No Idea How Hard It Would Be” and I think that is also a good description of me, over the past few years, trying to make this happen.

I am super pleased this show with Texas Public Radio has finally launched.

You can listen (you should listen!) here.

But also, you know, subscribe on Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever, so you won’t miss an episode.

If you’d like to see a quick YouTube preview of the episode, check that out here:

Post read (116) times.

Stay in Touch

We’ll let you know when we have new posts!

Facebook Twitter Linkedin

Copyright 2025 © All rights Reserved. Design by Sweb Development