Every week a moving truck with California plates crosses into El Paso on I-10. Somewhere inside is a family who believes they are about to keep every dollar they earn. I put that belief there. I am a deputy director in the Economic Development and Tourism Division of the Office of the Governor of Texas. My card says Brand Integrity. In practice I guard one word. The word is “No,” as in no state income tax, and it is the most valuable syllable in American public life. I have spent eleven years making sure nobody reads the sentence that follows it. People who arrive on that truck eventually call it a bait and switch. I find the phrase unkind. We never switched anything. Every bill was always there. We just schedule them so that you meet them one at a time, the way a good host introduces his guests. You save on income tax all year, and then you pay it back in three envelopes: the appraisal notice in April, the insurance renewal whenever the hail decides, and the tax bill in October. October is now, so I imagine a good many kitchen tables are reading this with a calculator. Our first principle is that the State of Texas does not tax your house. This is true, and I say it at every relocation summit in Palo Alto with one hand on my heart. The Texas Constitution forbids a state property tax. The state merely authorizes, caps, compresses, funds and blesses the school district, the county, the city, the community college, the hospital district, the emergency services district and the municipal utility district that tax your house on its behalf. When the bill arrives there are seven names on it, and none of them is ours. A crime with seven suspects never goes to trial. This year the median bill came to $4,232, seventh-highest in the nation. Our brochures show a family on a porch at sunset, and every photograph is accurate. We simply never photograph the mailbox. Every legislative session we deliver Historic Property Tax Relief, and I write the press release before the bill is filed. This cycle it was $51 billion, fifteen percent of the entire state budget. The number is real. What the release does not mention is that most of it pays to keep the relief we already announced in 2019. So the same relief gets announced, funded, re-announced and re-funded, and each time it is historic. Relief in Texas works like a subscription. You never own it. You renew it, and if the state ever stops paying, your old bill finds its way home like a loyal dog. Meanwhile the appraisal district mails its notice in April, alongside the bluebonnets. Your homestead value may rise ten percent a year, which we call a cap, in the same spirit in which we call the 85-mile-an-hour posting on our toll road a speed limit. Then comes protest season. In Austin, nearly four in ten homeowners file every year. We have turned civic grievance into a sporting calendar: dove in September, deer in November, the appraisal review board in May. A citizen may spend a Tuesday arguing with a government that has already won, and he leaves with a sense of agency, which costs us nothing. My personal favorite instrument is the Municipal Utility District. A developer buys a cotton field outside city limits and creates a small government to sell bonds for the pipes. The family that buys the house repays those bonds at more than a dollar per hundred of value, on top of everything else, for the next twenty to thirty years. The homestead exemption does not touch it, because the MUD is its own sovereign entity. The family on I-10 moved here to get away from government. In the new subdivisions outside Houston, they can own three. Then there is insurance, which I adore, because it is the only bill that arrives with an act of God stapled to it. The average homeowner premium went from under $2,000 in 2020 to over $3,500 this year. The Insurance Commissioner explained this to a House committee this month in the tone one uses to describe weather, because it was weather. Wind and hail cost insurers $5.8 billion last year alone. No legislator has ever voted for hail. Texas law does not even require you to buy homeowners insurance. Your mortgage lender does, and I have never once had to defend a mortgage lender at a town hall. Electricity is where we show off. Around the turn of the century Texas “restructured” its power market, a word championed by Ken Lay of Enron, a visionary in the field of things being restructured. In February 2021 Winter Storm Uri froze the grid, wholesale prices ran hundreds of times past normal, and the bill came due. We did not send that bill to anyone in particular. We securitized it. A line item now rides on power bills for thirty years. Your grandchildren will be paying for the week your pipes burst, and they will never know which week it was. Residential rates are up about forty percent since 2020, and the grid operator is fielding 474 gigawatts of connection requests, nine-tenths of them data centers. Your air conditioner now competes for electrons with a server farm in Abilene. Both are welcome customers. Only one of them negotiates its rate. The roads are my masterpiece. Governor Perry used to say Texas had three choices: toll roads, slow roads or no roads. We chose all three, and charged for the first. Between 2001 and 2020 Texas built more paid highway than nearly every other state combined, 852 miles of it, enough to run from Maine to South Carolina. Several of the nicest stretches in North Texas are majority-owned by Cintra, a Spanish company. Texas once belonged to the Spanish Crown. After two centuries of hard-won independence, we rented the freeway back to Spain. A toll you can ignore is merely a suggestion, so we gave our toll operators the most motivated enforcement in the union. A hundred unpaid tolls in a year makes you a Habitual Violator, which sounds like a country song and functions like a sentence. Your registration is blocked, you can be banned from the road, your car can be impounded, and a court can fine you up to $250 per unpaid toll. A man in Leander owed about $1,600, and roughly a third of it was fees. Texas has no income tax, but it has an excellent income detector, mounted on a gantry above the tollway. The newcomers always conclude that the brand failed them. They misunderstand the customer. The brand was never for them. When you remove the one tax that rises with your income, you have to collect the money from the things that rise with your existence: the roof, the road, the thermostat, the weather, and the 8.25 percent at the register. These are democratic taxes. The cashier and the oilman pay them at the same rate, which is a very different thing from paying the same share of their income. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy keeps doing the arithmetic. It keeps finding that the poorest Texas families pay a larger slice of their income in state and local taxes than any income group in California, while the top one percent here pay about three percent. The bottom forty percent of Texans would pay a lower rate in Sacramento. I have this framed in my office, facing the wall. Our top customer pays property tax too, of course, on a Hill Country ranch where a few dozen beehives qualify the acreage for agricultural valuation. The bees work very hard. They are the only things on the property that do. People talk about the state taking it back through the back door, as if there were only one. There are seven, each with its own elected board, its own bond election and its own invoice, and we photographed none of them. The front door is the only one in the brochure. It says No. Texas. Wide open for business. You are the business.