 Thank you very much Juan. We will move forward with the first part of the sort of setting the table, which is looking at structural issues that underline the policy concerns that affect the strengthening of Latino families. So we'll begin with Dr. Rogelio Sainz, who is Dean of the College of Public Policy, who will address the Latino demography and socioeconomic standing. Dean, thank you. So what we'll start off with now is looking at the realities, the demographic realities. And I talk about that demography that is working towards the empowerment of Latino, the potential empowerment of Latino, Latinos and also the socioeconomic realities. So these are kind of some of the opportunities and particularly pointing out some of the challenges that we have. Hopefully you can see a little bit. I'm going to be talking about the paradox of Texas, which I'll describe in a minute, and that is also the reality of the Texas political world, the historical and contemporary efforts that we have found to minimize Latino political power and socioeconomic resources. And then the paradox is the demographic overview of the Latino population that we see a lot of favorable signs of Latino population growth, but at the same time challenges towards Latino political representation. And then the other side of the paradox is socioeconomic standing of the Latino population and in particular the Latin socioeconomic standing of Latinos nationally on many dimensions and indicators and finish up with policy challenges. So the paradox of Texas as it concerns Latinos is that on the one hand, Texas is a national leader in the demography of its Latino population. We're the second largest Latino population in the country behind California in terms of population growth, one year, five years, ten years. We're the leader in terms of the most population growth in the Latino population here in the state of Texas. On the other hand, Texas is below average and in many cases way below average with respect to socioeconomic standing of its Latino population on many, many measures. And I will make this PowerPoint available so you don't have to be joining everything real fast. That'll be available. This is again the reality of the Texas political world. This is the reality in which we live in and we try to say, well, ya no importa tanto eso, but it is a part of the reality, that historical background that created and established Latinos as a proletariat population that was situated at the bottom, the loss of land in the making of the proletariat workforce. Historian has talked about the second class citizenship of Latinos here in the state of Texas. The violence, including lynching, that oftentimes is not taught and it is not taught in paint control system. The separate and unequal schools, the Mexican schools that we had and the disenfranchisement and poll tax of the Latino population. So all those early ingredients then to keep Latinos down and then there was a particular period, the civil rights era, where we saw some temporary social, economic and political gains that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. As soon as the power structure realized ways that they could get around this and in this they did and we see the undoing the civil rights gains beginning with the Reagan administration and that have continued today. And now as the Latino population has grown, we have the contemporary Latino impending majority-minority era. That is a time when Latinos are the major part of the state of Texas and its future and we've seen the systemic efforts to minimize Latino political power and their socioeconomic standings. So let's take a look at the demographic overview of the Latino population and here these are the optimistic signs that we see. The growth that has taken place in a very short period of time between 1980 and 2015, over 35 years, you can see in red the Latino population more than triply at that particular time from about 3 million to about 10.7 million. At the same time in yellow you can see very, very slow growth of the white population. So this is kind of the demographic trends that we see in the state of Texas. With respect to the representation, the share of the Latino population, the Texas population that is Latino, we can see the growth that has taken place in red from about one out of every five Texans being Latino in 1980 to almost two out of every five, 39% in 2015. At the same time with the aging of the white population and the youthfulness of the Latino population, you see whites losing ground, demographic ground, from being two-thirds of the population, 66% down to 43%. It is only a matter of years that the Latinos will become the demographic majority in the state of Texas. And this is due very much to the age-sex structure, the youthfulness of the Latino population and the aging of the white population. On the left is where demographers use the age-sex pyramids and you have along the vertical axis up and down age groups represented from zero to four all the way to 85 and older. And at the bottom, the percentage of the overall population in a particular group. So females, for example, in red, zero to four represent about 4.3% of the overall Latino population. You can see a white base demonstrating the very useful nature of the Latino population. On the other hand, on the right, you have the white population which is an aging population. No longer do you have the bars at the four, over four you have bars that are just above 2%. So the aging white population. And this has major implications for the future of the demography of Texas. And this is the reality that we see that really impacts public policymaking in the state of Texas. Whites and Latinos are two very different populations in the case of an age 40 and older. The yellow is a white population that is a majority in those age groups. In red, that's where the Latino population is a majority. So at ages less than 40, you can see the power of the Latino population in red. As we see then, oftentimes we want to see there's these demographic shifts that are taking place, the Democratic Party at the national level says the demographics will take care of that, we don't need to worry about that. But in reality, we have forgotten the white growth in Texas which is what I call the forgotten part of the empowerment situation. And people say, well, look, it happened in California. California was a red state and in a relatively short period of time it has become blue. Why doesn't that happen in Texas? And part of the reason and what we're going to do here is looking at the voting age population, citizen population. And we can see in the year 2000 there were about 60% of both populations in California and Texas. The citizen population of voting age were about 60% were white in California and Texas and put the similarities in there. In the period between 2000 and 2015 we can see in California the voting age white population decreased by about 120,000 in Texas it increased by approximately one million. So you can see and part of that why we see Texas continuing being a red state versus California is these kind of patterns that we find. We can also find with the child population for example in California during this period 2000 to 2015 there were about 21 fourths less children, white children in the state of California. In Texas it was a reduction because of the aging of the white population in Texas but only a 7% reduction. In migration, state interstate migration is another one. In California whites are moving out of California over that particular 15 year period there was a net out migration there were 745,000 more whites than left California than injured. In contrast in the state of Texas there were 418,000 more whites that moved into the state than moved out. So this is part of the challenge that we see in the question why hasn't Texas become blue like California? And what we see is these 14 states including California are states where you have more deaths, white deaths than you have white births. In California this has been going on since about 1998, 1999. So this is a demographic reality. We've also depended very heavily on our numbers to continue to increase but they have been slowing down and not only slowing down they've been slowing down significantly. We can see in the earlier points of time in the 1990s, between 1990 and 2000 the Latino population was growing 5% each year 5% during the decade 54% growth. Now in 2010 to 2015 it's about close to 3%, 2.6% it is a very slow growth at the same time you see a slight increase in the growth of the white population. And we've also seen the further complications having to do with political barriers that Republicans have erected to minimize Latino and Latino political power. Direct measures of voter ID laws the disingenuous drawing of redistricting maps and indirect measures to slashing the public education funding in the 2011 legislature $5.4 billion at the time that Latino children were becoming the majority in schools and we see in mass incarceration which has taken away the vote of many people of color. But there is an opportunity there is still an opportunity here in the state of Texas in 2015 there were 3.5 million children less than 18 years of age which signifies that every year 197,000 are turning age 18 and most of these 95, 96% were born in the United States and they're eligible to vote every month 16,400 turn 18 every day 541 and since I've been talking about 4.8 children have turned age 18 so this is an opportunity an opportunity to engage these youngsters to register them and to vote. Now let's take a look at the socio-economic understanding of the Latino population and data analysis for those of you looking at checking what the credentials are about the study. This comes from the 2015 American Community Survey Public Use Migratory Data Sample and it's taking Texas for example as a base and ranking it relative to other states and Juan and I did a study about 2 years ago and this is kind of an update on that so that we look at rankings having to do one with the most favorable where Latinos are the most favorable say education, 51 is the least favorable and then we have measures here for children the percent of children 3 and 4 year olds that are in preschool the percentage of 14 to 17 year olds that are still in high school or have already graduated from high school that is they are not dropouts the percent of children 0 to 17 with health insurance coverage and the percentage of children 0 to 17 below poverty, above poverty line to put all in the favorable measure direction here for the adult measures for the householders the percent of the population 25 and older that have a bachelor's degree or higher the number of STEM majors per 1,000 people in the labor force and the percentage of workers that are working full time the median household income and then health care coverage as well as being above poverty these are the results here these are for children here they have those 4 measures and they are the column that has Latino and you can see that Texas with respect to Latino children ranks 30th when it comes to the percentage of kids 3 and 4 that are in preschool it ranks 32nd in the percentage of kids 14 to 17 that are still in school or high school graduates it ranks 45th with respect to children having health care insurance and it ranks 28th when it comes to being above poverty overall with those 4 the ranking is about the average is about 34 that means that 33 states overall tend to be doing better with respect to the socioeconomic status of their children and we can see for the other two groups major groups white whites and blacks they also have challenges as well but you can see that the rankings aren't as high as in case of Latino children and in the case of whites we're talking about 48th compared to other whites in terms of insurance 94% have insurance compared to 87% for Latino children we see similar results for the case of the adult population for Latinos one where we do find favorable if we compare Latinos here in the state of Texas to Latinos elsewhere is in percent householders 56% are home owners only two other states do better but look at the white population 70% versus 58% in bachelor's degree we rank 37th in STEM majors 32nd in full time employment everyone is working 34th place but we still are not out of poverty median health goals and health insurance coverage 43rd and above poverty 21 here the average ranking for Latinos is 23 compared to 18.6 for white and 19.9 for blacks so it suggests that even though we're doing much worse than other Latinos throughout the country we're also doing worse than the white population significantly worse and in some cases worse than the African American population and some of the rankings that we see because you see some of the differences between gender for Latinos females rank a little bit worse than Latino males 25 to about 23 and then particularly foreign born females adults 29 fits their ranking so the policy challenges that after going through this presentation we can see the Latino growth of Latinos continues to be faster than that of whites but still in contrast to California the white growth is a formidable kind of growth as we've seen and there has also been the slowing Latino population growth so we can't rely only that demographics is going to take care of us and then the Texas Latino socioeconomic standing middle of the pact or worse nationally relative to other racial and ethnic peers as well as whites and blacks in Texas and the policy challenges here if we look at children and those four indicators there is not one indicator that is positive all of them are negative in a particular preschool enrollment health insurance coverage and poverty if we highlight the case for Latino adults the only positive one is when we compare to other Latinos with respect to home ownership but it's negative when we compare to white 70% versus 56% and we also fare very badly but it comes to health insurance coverage college education STEM and poverty so you can see again the ingredients at the top in terms of where we are going with our children if things don't change it's going to be the recreation poverty that we see the generational unemployment the generational lack of health insurance the generational lack of housing and so forth and to give you an idea how much we really are behind but it comes to STEM fields for example the number of STEM majors these are individuals who are in the workforce they majored in one of the STEM fields and per 1000 people in the labor force you can see white males are at the top for every 1000 whites in the labor force there are 123 that have a diploma that is a STEM field black males followed by about 56 followed by white females 48 and then we finally get to Latinos, Latino foreign born males 38, Latino native born males 37 and we go down the line and we can see that females are particularly way at the bottom in the case of Latinas 19 and 17 being the STEM race and with that I'll go ahead and end it here so moving on the next area that presents structural challenges is in yet the way that the budget priorities are made in Austin so we're very fortunate to have Eva de Luna Castro who's with the Center for Public Policy Priorities and she's the state budget and program director for Invest in Texas thank you and we were at they've just set the table here so you're not going to hear everything there is to know about the state budget but understand the challenges for education healthcare, labor force all the areas that we're going to cover the remainder of the symposium again my name is Eva de Luna Castro and I've been a budget analyst since 1991 technically and as a state representative from Houston when I was a graduate student at the LBJ school so I came to Texas in 1990 he was on the redistricting committee and house appropriations in 1991 so that's where I got my first exposure to the Texas state budget and that also turned out to be the last time that Texas had a major state tax increase so 1991 it's a long time for Texas to go as far as putting more on that table that we're setting the table for so the tax and budget conversation really is inviting more and more people to be at that table and taking away more and more food it's really, you're going to see in a bit how that works out to the detriment of what we can do for Latinos and for all Texans, every family in Texas deserves access to education and healthcare what Texas has done in our tax system is make it harder and harder to do that and the proposals this session don't really change that and they also kind of get in the way of local governments and really need to do that so again, just some quick highlights there's a discussion paper in your packets there will be a few more slides here that aren't in there just kind of again setting the table the Center for Public Policy Priorities for those of you who've never heard of us was created by the Bernie Benedictine sisters and they originally wanted to be providing direct healthcare through their nursing homes and clinics to shaping healthcare policy in Austin so we started off as a branch of the Benedictine Resource Center and we've been working still it's amazing on healthcare it's always been a big priority for us but also education, school finance economic opportunity covered that whole area and then health and wellness included nutrition programs SNAP and other school meals and then me and Nick Levine work on taxid budget issues so I'm glad to be here this morning and this afternoon to talk to you all about this so this kind of sums up the big picture and I do start in 1993 because this is basically starting with a lot of time the Texas really tried to do more to get more tax revenue on the table and it wasn't really because the legislature felt like being nice about it and we were right after a lot of the big prison lawsuits and school finance lawsuits so those of you who have been working on school finance and school equity know early 90s is really when Texas first started to do something about the main thing that the state tries to fund public schools so in 1991 we saw a state sales tax increase changing the state gasoline tax gasoline tax raises money not just for highways but also for public schools and then those two were really the major shifts so in 1993 if you look at the act season on the right side here taxes as a share of all the money that people in Texas have was about 5% so 5% of all the money being made in Texas and income was going to pay for state taxes by 2017 which is where we are now we dropped to a little below 4% and you might think well that's only a 1% drop that can't really make that much of a difference in how the state provides public services a 1% drop in personal income all the income that we all make from our jobs and from investments turned out to be $14 billion a year so the way that Texas writes its budget how much money would be available every two years is how we think about that almost $28 billion more would have been available for our schools higher education healthcare all of the things that the state has to provide all the new things that it's decided to take on the border security and $28 billion would go a huge way to change the discussion that's happening in Austin right now we would not be seeing $6 billion increase in our local property taxes for schools we would be having a very different conversation about how to allocate there would still be scarce dollars from everyone to spend very little compared to other states but that would really change things instead of what we've done our economy has changed in a way that doesn't make our tax system work well and then legislators have actually cut state taxes repeatedly so that's what's been happening at the same time that the Latino share of the population rises there's a little kind of hitch here in 1999 the other expert here could tell me that I probably used one data source up to 1999 and then another one for 2009 but about 40 almost 40% of the population in Texas will be Mexican-American, Mexican all the everybody that makes up the Latino population almost 40% so steady increase a lot of that driven by the birth rate and then meanwhile taxes as a share of our income is going steadily down the other gray line that you see there is all the money that the state has federal, state highway funds, all the money that the state allocates through the budget that's gone from about almost 8% of the economy there we're measuring as a share of the economy nor a state product it's dropped to about 6.5% that little peak that you see only the recovery act in 2009 in 2011 a little more for Texas just for those few years but otherwise it's been a steady steady downturn that again that's a result of state tax cuts and the legislature just choosing to do things like provide fewer and fewer services again just as Roger said just at the time when we need these institutions to do more the legislature is making it a conscious choice to put us in a situation where we can do less I will talk a little more about property tax because that's an important component it's the bigger component of how we fund public services in Texas but here you see where the state gets its revenue the biennial budget is what we're looking at here in the biennial revenue situation and this hasn't really changed since I've been looking at the budget for I've worked at the controller's office in between working for that state rep and working for the center but this is usually what you see every two years Texas make up about half of the money that the state can appropriate federal money is about a third of the budget so as much as you'll hear our congressmen and U.S. senators talk about getting the federal government out of here and letting us take care of ourselves we really do need federal money to pay for our health care programs foster care, child care almost everything in the job training and workforce development area everything the workforce commission does the environmental quality and there are some parts of the state budget that are almost entirely federally funded housing is another big area that depends on federal money but the big picture is what we're looking at here healthcare advocates will already be aware that in many cases for chip and Medicaid we need to have those tax dollars those dollars in blue to get the federal matching money so in some cases cut in taxes don't just lose us those dollars they also lose federal matching dollars for chip and for Medicaid. Here again we're going back to look at the bigger picture Juan referred to I mean probably a minute there's not a whole lot of people that enjoy paying taxes it's something we do because it's better than the alternative which are people who are unhealthy and illiterate so it's like the surprise we pay to have a decent society and the way that taxes decides to make us pay taxes is what you're looking at here this is taking those other bunnies out of it we're not looking at tuition or fines or investments that the state might have this is just taxes that we pay to local governments and to the state so what you see if you're looking at the pie on the left local taxes make up more than half of this tax bill if I were to take any of you at random out of the audience you're paying more to your local governments than you are to the state 55% versus 45% and of that money that goes to the state more than half of it is the state sales tax if my colleague Dick Levine were here he would tell you that being this dependent on the sales tax is bad for several reasons one major one is that with an economy so relying on the sales tax and other consumption taxes like oil, gasoline tax, cigarette tax most states ideally what you want is a three-legged stool for a tax system income, sales and property taxes but tax is a two-legged stool and at the state level because the state is really really relying on the sales tax more of a total stick I mean it's like jumping up and down every time the economy goes down and takes state services with it so the state sales tax is also bad for another reason that especially hits Latino families hard but here the main thing is so much of what we pay to the state is the sales tax locally property taxes are primarily for schools more than half of the property taxes we pay are for schools this causes also a lot of issues that goes into it in more detail the other half roughly is allocated between cities, counties and special districts so what we argue about here property taxes are important but we understand the limited inability to pay especially for people on a fixed income but we're going to come out of this symposium with positive proposals one is property tax circuit breaker there are ways to make the property tax more tolerable one is local optional homestead exemption that are based on a flat dollar exemption instead of percent so there are ways to improve this but this is what we're looking at right now this is why it matters so much how we collect taxes here we're looking at a controller record that breaks all the families in Texas into quintiles each fifth of Texas households is what you see here so roughly 11 million households in Texas so about 2.2 million in each of these brackets the very top fifths of families up at the very top families in Texas it could be one income earner or a couple but that's a family making almost $147,000 a year or more so both of us in this room who are fortunate enough to be making that much 4.5% of your income goes to pay state and local taxes now those at the very bottom here are making less than $35,000 a year roughly almost 18% of that family at the bottom is paying for state and local taxes the sales tax primarily a family making less than $35,000 is buying groceries we don't collect sales tax on that but they might need out in a restaurant to do pay sales tax clothing soap, shampoo, anything that you buy for your household you're going to pay sales tax furniture, sales tax gasoline, taxes pretty much everything that family down there buys is going to be taxed by the state they also are going to be paying property taxes at the local level so that family ends up paying they have their tax share is 4 times almost 4 times as high as that family at the top and where do you think Latino families are most likely to be represented based on what we just saw I'm not going to say crazy, never mind a third of Texas Latinos, also about a third of American Americans are in this very bottom bottom quintile that's compared to less than 20% of Anglo households so that means again Texas Latino randomly off the street there's a 50-50 chance there is this income bracket this is a place where that tax system hurts you the hardest keeps you from moving up into the middle class doesn't let you save, doesn't let you put money away for college but all of that starts with our tax system and it also makes it hard for legislators to get more money on the table because the way they're trying to do it now is to take it from the people who have the least they're trying to pay their bills and don't have that much left over at them so the resistance to tax increases is also because you're asking the people who have the least to pay the most so that's the main challenge again this is the tax cuts that we've had in 2015 the franchise tax which is only being paid at this point by businesses that have at least a million dollars a year in income who do you think that tax cut out and do not help the family that the bottom that one was for the top the 2017 legislature is talking about completely getting rid of the franchise tax again you only pay that if you make at least a million dollars a year from your business you're talking about getting rid of it completely that would be an eight billion dollar cut to schools and healthcare again that's not going to be felt by the people at the very bottom so the tax trend is going in exactly the wrong direction now it affects this chart because we are already 47 in state spending per capita we're actually average we saw in the previous presentation how in some places Texas is exactly where other states are local spending is one of those 25th in local spending per capita but we're almost at the bottom 47 and this is from the Census Bureau for 2014 a lot of other states decided to expand Medicaid a lot more federal money in their budget so Texas did not do that so this ranking is by 2015 using another day the stores were 50 that is actually something that we traditionally we've been at the bottom five ever since I started looking at these numbers 25 years ago but the way that that affects our schools and our healthcare funding is what I'll touch on real briefly in the next few slides again this is in the paper but there's a few slides that I especially wanted to see those long term trends that will help your other discussions this I won't get into as much the main thing to know about the budget is you can't spend money you don't have that's why I spent some time talking about our tax system we don't raise it in the form of taxes then the legislature can't appropriate it when I'm trading the budget for the next two years and it is a legislative process the governor will again and there and veto things at the very end but for the most part it's the House and Senate and with limited amount of money there's pretty much stuff with that there is the ring day fund that they can choose to use we've been doing a lot of advocacy around that but for the most part it's that new incoming state tax revenue that's at stake this is what the budget looks like for the period we're in right now 2016 2017 biennium the part at the left is the part that has to balance that depends on taxes and unfortunately the next budget is likely to be about the same amount 106 billion might be as much as 108 but they don't have any more money to work with this time because previous tax cuts and also choices to move some of the money to the highway fund the pie on the right includes the highway fund and federal money but the one on the other side you see how when we talked about improving the budget and the budget being a moral document I tell people we our choices are in the right order 39% of the general revenue goes to pre-cade through 12th grade education the sessions of people want to divert that to vouchers 39% is for public ed 14% for higher education so well over half of our bond money is clearly an investment in the education of our children and young adults another 30% is that money I mentioned we have to use that money to match federal dollars from Medicaid and healthcare foster care other programs but that right there nobody could look at that and say we're choosing to put a bigger value on public safety or something else but well we don't have money because of tax cuts that's also where the reductions are going to happen federal money makes the healthy human service part look a lot bigger 37% but for the most part public education has always been most likely will continue to be the single largest use of state tax dollars this is in your paper so I won't get into it too much other than to point out that I think in the education discussion you'll be touching on how staff diversity is a major issue in higher education it's also an issue at the elementary through secondary level compared to our students who are 52% I'm using the terms that are in the Texas education I'm using the word Hispanic it's the term that's used Hispanic students became the majority more than 50% of our student enrollment in 2011 teacher diversity has not really improved much about 60% of teachers themselves are still compared to about a fourth of staff teachers that are Hispanic I think that speaks to what we heard earlier just at the time that we need our schools to serve students better 2011 is the year here where we're spending about 11,237 dollars state, federal and local money all that together you get 11,400 dollars for students local money was already the single largest way we paid for students that's the green line below that is state spending for people right at the bottom you see what federal dollars did for our schools the main thing is 2011 is the recent peak in what we do for our students for student spending it's also again the year in which more than half of our students were Latinos just at the time that they're the single largest group of kids in school that's when the cuts have made in 2012 it was because of the economic recession they've never gone back they've let local property taxes go up using the green line going up here the orange line goes down because we don't have as much state revenue as we used to college students we do see tremendous increases in enrollment both at the community college and public university level again this is the public school and higher ed support from the budget is more than half of what we're doing and it is at this point benefiting primarily in community colleges Latino students are the single largest group in higher ed they're about even with Anglo students right now but the issue that will be discussed in greater detail is the tradeoff again just as Latino enrollment is increasing we see tuition deregulation and major cuts to public support for education UT and A&M or big flagship universities get less than a fourth of their money from the state budget at this point and tuition and affordability and student loans those are all things we get at that time what the state budget fails to do for our students and our families healthcare access is one other big part of the budget helping human services is primarily Medicaid spending in the fall ages get their health coverage luckily this part of our health insurance covered that comes from private jobs or the military we're not going to talk a whole lot about military and military civilian what that does for Latino but it is important in health insurance 65% of Texans get health care through private insurance usually associated with their job so that leaves the other 35% that depends on Medicaid Medicare or to be uninsured the reason I highlight the part the 9% of all Texans who are uninsured and Latino is because that is actually huge improvement since the last time I looked at these statistics back then that piece was the one and a half times as big as it is there all of this is due to the affordable care act this shows huge gains in coverage for Texans but the fact that it depends on the affordable care act makes everybody at TPPP works on this extremely worried and huge advocates for keeping the affordable care act today the Republicans in the house are trying to repeal it for the I forget how many times I've tried but if you can do one thing today call whatever congressman represents you and tell them they will they actually voted it okay, the good news is we hear the U.S. Senate won't approve that but this is the director's ultimate advocacy and to lose the coverage that we have that's why TPPP was originally created this is something that in fact so many other areas I guess the reason we work on health and education is because students won't learn in school if they're sick and then your healthcare as an older adult depends a lot on your educational attainment so you really can't separate them out but I'll tell you briefly on Medicaid and how it relates to the budget after public schools it is the single and the second largest use of state tax dollars and as we saw earlier with those pyramids remember how the Latino pyramid looked like this well as the average age of Latinos especially women and it's over 65 you're going to see this piece on the left the right here I'm sorry it's changing to be more and more Hispanic Medicaid enrollees that are adults the reason that they're only like one out of four Medicaid enrollees but they account for about two-thirds of the costs so it makes sense the older you are the more likely you're going to either be a pregnant woman who qualifies to Medicaid coverage or a Texan or had a disability so two-thirds of Medicaid spending is for the smaller five the other ones, children and Medicaid more than 60% are Latino kids but they're pretty cheap to cover $200 a month for a premium as opposed to about $1200 a month for the premium coverage for those on the other side but again as more and more Latino especially women get to be old enough to qualify for community care home care if they don't qualify for those programs and it's also likely they'll be the workers providing jobs they'll be the home care aids or home workers so on one or the other side they're affected by state decisions about Medicaid just as in the public education chart what we see happening in Medicaid as as the enrollment becomes more and more and the state is spending once and less for enrolling some of this is demographic children are cheaper so more and more children means the cost comes down but some of it is straight out cuts that have been made that affect access to doctors and therapists and other kinds of healthcare providers so the two things in the budget that have always been priorities and that are enrolling more and more people are also the areas where they are considered or are cutting because they have cut taxes one other chart but actually I'll skip ahead to this one this is the important one because it sets a stage for what's going to be happening the main thing is that legislators have really gone out of their way to figure out how to pay for highways and roads unfortunately they have decided to do that by asking voters to approve constitutional amendments that mean money can only be spent on highways so this session that cuts are being proposed to helping human services and even to public safety are because 5 billion of taxes was dedicated by the very few people actually voted for this two of the highway funds so 5 billion can't be spent on public ed and higher ed in the next budget cycle the one after that there's another dedication of cart taxes they kicked in so these choices that legislators have made don't just tie the hands of the government by deciding the 2018-2019 budget the decisions go beyond that public education this is the budget comperies senate bill 1 are going to be working out what is the house proposing and what is the senate proposing hopefully the best of the two proposals if they go with what the house wants to do for public education there will be more money going to public schools for students the better proposal for higher education is also being made by the house senate would devastate especially special items which fund a lot of things that universities don't get funded through enrollment so centers and small business development and other things that are free standing institutes would see pretty big cuts under the higher ed proposal we hope they go with the house but both of them are talking about a pretty big cut to help the human services in the form of Medicaid so again this isn't we hope it's not just because they want to do this or because they know that Latinos are pretty big enrollees in some of these programs they just cut taxes and they keep cutting taxes we don't think they're cutting taxes because they want to reduce that burden on the lowest income families I'm not going to give them that benefit of the doubt but the matter of fact is again less money to invest on these areas and the way the budget gets written is a whole other presentation that I can talk about I think it will be touched on by the next panelist who's going to talk to us about the political system the budget itself is the extreme case of a process that's really closed to three people three people are deciding the scenario and who decides who's the speaker of the house of representatives and the lieutenant governor and all of that that's about the political process so I think I'll stop there again there's more in your paper how long we've ranked very, very poorly but I think the main issue comes back to we need a certain amount of tax revenue just to keep up with growth roughly about 8% more every two years our legislature is trying to do something every single time they come back to Austin to make everybody compete and fight for the what's little that's left after those tax cuts take effect so something that changes that equation is we're trying to come up with a new way to do this we know we have to talk about the effect on families and people because nobody cares about taxes we hope they care about people so I'll leave it there it's a lot to absorb right now but I think the next people will help us add that other element animal we knew this first part would be a little sort of it seems like it's a lot of bad news but you know, courage so the next portion or the next presentation again dealing with sort of structural problems deals with Latino political power and policy change and the environment that we find ourselves in the insist part of the path to power of course is we mean political power as well so we're very fortunate to have Dr. Henry Flores from St. Mary's University distinguished research professor to take over this portion of the Dr. Flores, thank you well thank you Roger and Romilio and one for organizing this there's a much needed symposium and if you think that was bad news, I'm going to finish hearing what I've got to say and I'm going to read some of this and some of it I'm not going to read because I've read thought some of this stuff in my head a lot of what I'm going to speak about and present to you are thoughts and ideas that I've been working on since probably 1974 and I've written two books that cover a lot of this particular material and it's also based upon my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement Voting Rights Litigation about the years and just doing a lot of research and interacting with the politicians in various states across the nation everything from Ku Klux Klan members to some of the wealthiest men in the nation and how they think about the political process and so forth and I suddenly concluded how far we are removed from the reality of politics in the United States to date we've been able to make our presence known but to a little avail is particularly evident in the realm of state education policy nevertheless education is only one of the areas important to the Latino community as you can see from the agenda we are focusing this symposium on not just education but also labor force development housing and health and human services issues these are just the issues of the most pressing and obvious and in the future there will be more that we'll be speaking to the issues at the center of today's symposium because combined to make up the core of the Latino family Genestad I will not go into detail as to the current state of Genestad we've seen it already because you've seen it already what I will say is that in every category education, labor force development housing, health and human services we lag behind other social groups in the state and far behind as pointed out earlier our poverty levels income levels, employment rates lag behind those African-Americans and Anglos in Texas and my task here this afternoon is to try to identify some of the structural barriers that prevent us from really having a bigger impact and also to help us all think about what it is we can do and what it is we should think about trying to do beyond what we're doing already for many years it's been assumed that political power is gained by electing individuals who agree ideologically however once in office we find that our representatives can only marginally affect policy and then it takes years for these meager changes to emerge this occurs because of the basic structures that make up the states governmental and political policy processes some of these structures are ideological in nature and almost immutable while others are comprised of statutes, policies and programs which can be changed and altered nevertheless the alteration process is structured in such a manner as well to make changes almost impossible without drastic interventions such as a federal lawsuit and even then this process the legal can be arduous and as we did you know what's up he was here earlier he stepped out for a minute but you know you can ask David about education how many decades we've been suing the state over education funding and policy and it hasn't changed much anyway for purposes of this discussion the barriers can be placed into three categories ideological political and bureaucratic each category in turn has two facets one the way decisions are made and two the way the the institutions are structured let me take them one at a time the ideological perhaps the easiest to discuss is the ideological barrier or sentence of barriers but they are also the most difficult if not impossible to overcome and require very disciplined and long range strategies the principal reason this barrier is almost impossible to overcome is simply because it is deeply embedded in every institution and within every person that works within those institutions our perceptions are driven and the perceptions of the think of this think of the people in power not just the politicians the bureaucrats the wealthy people in the nation who are looking at the system to try to manipulate it think of it through their eyes because that's what you're dealing with you think you're hooking through their eyes in a lot of different ways of how they see you how they see us how they see society in general and their place in roles in that society structure our perceptions and their perceptions are driven by the way we are formed ideologically and this formation begins in the family unit and is reinforced in our educational system religious institutions the media our peer group and within the working world that we live in every day the ideological barriers allow each and every one of us to determine how we interact with persons of other races genders ages nations and also determine whether we view the world through broad or narrow lenses we form these ideological barriers principally in our childhood and carry them throughout our lifetimes bringing them to bear in our workplaces and the political realm the barriers also assist us in identifying issues and problems they help us identify what is a problem they help us identify what is a problem that has to be dealt with in the public policy process that's one thing the second thing it does is to help us define what that problem is in such a way that we want to define it thirdly it helps us identify how to deal with the problem what is the policy solution for this problem and finally the ideology helps us try to understand how to implement whatever we've identified to solve that particular problem so in some case for you you'll see a problem for you it won't be a problem i.e. poverty poverty for a conservative is a problem as Rohini already pointed out poverty is defined by a conservative and a wealthy person sometimes has a fault with that individual and they can work on it themselves they can put themselves up by their bootstraps they can work and get out of it but today poverty is not a problem you don't need policies to deal with poverty if you're a progressive you see poverty as an artifact a natural artifact of the entire economic system which means that the economic system and the institutions in that system are responsible for dealing with that problem two different perceptions of the same concept two different ways of defining it two different interpretations towards how to approach the problem etc you can do it in almost every category public education, health care, housing employment and so forth the only way to change or dramatically affect the ideological barriers is to develop a multifaceted long-term strategy at many levels we must change the curriculum in schools you ever wonder why it's so hard to get in the school system because Mexican American studies bring our stories into the curriculum they bring our community's needs into the curriculum they teach young people that these are important to deal with and they're going to end up in the public sector they're going to end up being owners of businesses or whatever and when that generation comes to bear they're going to be defining the public policy process that's completely different than it's being defined now so curriculum, perceptions in the media and the minds of policy makers at all governmental levels one of the interesting issues that I've been dealing with and I've started to make it part of my expert reports when it comes to civil rights cases and I did it first in the section 5 hearing over the voter ID law that first declared the voter ID law unconstitutional in Washington DC in 2013 was when I got off the stand somebody took me inside and said that's the first time I've ever heard Chicago studies used as a research methodological technique in a lawsuit and I said I thought about it for a while and I said you know what I really haven't done anything different other than tell our story one of the ideological problems in America and the intellectuals world and academia and the legal system is that the concept of race that we're dealing with is a dual race concept dual race theory those in power see racial questions as black or white and relationship between black and white and so we end up and our story ends up not being told and we end up being invisible so when I went on the stand I told our story I told our story to the judges about what life was in South Texas I took a lot of the work from David you have to give him credit because he's the one who wrote the first real deep history to be told and and then I just carried it forth and the judges asked me a lot of questions and you'd be surprised how little they know or even hear about this so that's what I mean by taking our story and making it into the forefront of the policy process because it's just not we know it and we know it down here in South Texas but they don't know it in Washington they refuse to hear about it in Austin so part of the strategy is you have to tell this story and telling this story is a long term process it's got to be told in the courtroom it's got to be told in the classroom it's got to be told in the halls of Austin it's got to be told everywhere the political barriers that's one, the ideological world the political barriers the barriers created in the political world may appear obvious to some but they are extensive because of the many layered nature of our political system and the fact that generally power is diffused throughout the system sometimes it is difficult to identify which level of government is responsible for administering a given solution the budget process for instance within our community as a result it behooves the Latino community to develop a thorough understanding of one how government functions and two how government is structured and I guess three how the bureaucracy functions and four how it functions how it's structured so this includes identifying the formal positions of power the informal positions of power what exactly they can do where the boundaries of those powers are and then try to develop long term strategies to one embed ourselves in the system as much as possible so keep running political campaigns keep winning them as much as possible get them a bureaucracy and start changing the bureaucracy from within again folks often ask me what are you doing directing a masters in public administration up training Latino bureaucrats that's what I'm doing we stop and think we need people that work in there so we can manipulate the process and some of my students I can see them doing things here and there and everywhere and funny strange little ways a lot of people just don't notice because bureaucrats are really really important that structure as well we need to educate our business folks the young individuals that are going to the business world because they develop a sense of conscience about who they are and the needs of our community I was part of I was on the first board of what was known as the Westside Development Corporation here in San Antonio and anchored partially here by UTSA and St. Mary's and we did a really good study of the Westside and one thing we discovered was how huge the economy is on the Westside two we also discovered how huge that economy bleeds why because there are no businesses on the Westside for people to spend money in so the money leaves the community and ends up on the Northside so that's where people have to go to shop so our Latino business folks have got to learn to start investing in our community and develop an infrastructure financial business infrastructure within our community I've been teaching that for a number of years and you go to some of the branches of the banks on the Westside and my graduates are in there working making loans and trying to encourage you but folks that do business there but they still bleed and I think the beloved Chocomesa did a study a number of years ago also looking at the informal economy on the Westside and discovered just a bunch of small businesses that nobody even thinks about they're almost like operating under the radar and the amounts of money in those tire shops and just going on and on and on there's money there and people working and generating jobs and doing this on the other and we're not taking advantage of it and developing it in bigger ways so get Latinos in office get Latinos in the public policy process get Latinos in the business circle but with a conscience that can bring solutions to our needs into the world third area decisional processes oh, these are amazing because I sat down and tried to enumerate them and I'll just give you an example of some of them statutes, policies, procedures parliamentary regulations precedence, customs, traditions and it goes on and on and on some are formalized they're written statements are there and everywhere some are not we've been doing it this way forever kind of thing fundamentally these barriers are designed to create conservative policies and laws that generally are not designed to completely solve a problem or thoroughly address an issue I'll give you a good example of this when the voter ID law was first proposed Senate bill 14 the informal laws and rules of the state senate the governor's office and the state house were used to fast-track that legislation and just shove it down people's throat the only people that were able to even stop it momentarily were some Latino legislators and one black legislator on March 23rd, 2011 take a look at that date of the house term one of the most revealing dates in the history of the state legislature and our guys they held them up they tried 67 times to amend the doggone thing 5 times there were attempts to point out to the leadership of the house that maybe this law violated the federal law or the voting rights act and the responses were incredible we don't care that's not our responsibility to think about those kinds of things just arrogance and they tried but they couldn't obviously overcome it it went to the federal court later but still those rules that allowed them to manipulate the legislative process you know are an example of some of these things I'm talking about embedded within a decisional process or something that I've come to identify as filtering systems there's three of them the first one is a combination of ideological political kind of bureaucratic and it's one that's really kind of insidious and we just don't even think about it really the filtering system is designed or mechanism is designed to exclude exclude any ideas that are deemed inappropriate politically and socially to a given culture here's an example remember the housing bubble 2008 you remember how it almost destroyed the economy the nation you remember how many people lost their homes can you tell me how many bankers went to prison you know how many banks were nationalized because of that force to obey laws we don't talk about the nationalization of banks and we don't talk about sending bankers to do some hard time you know, if somebody's got it said to Attica, when they came out they'd be thinking about all kinds of different things you know they would be thinking about their sins how did I end up here but no, we don't do that we don't teach that in business schools we don't teach it lawyers don't talk about these kinds of things we don't talk about it in intellectual academic circles we don't talk about it in the normal course of everyday life nationalization of banks is something that a third world country for some past communist society would think of doing it but not us that's an example of the first type of exclusion mechanism our system filters out ideas like that they're just not socially acceptable, politically acceptable the second mechanism takes the remaining policy alternatives and either waters them down through the decision making process deal making, bargaining trade offs, whatever they want to do do you ever notice how laws get passed I'll tell you what I'll do this for you tomorrow if you do this for me today oh I'm sorry I can't go with you this piece of legislation says congressman so and so to the lobbyists but you can count on me next time my constituents won't stand for it they go on and on and on line drawn here, line drawn there and by the time you get a piece of legislation that's passable it's been watered down and gutted for the most part that's a second filtering type of mechanism society and then the third one is accepting a policy that is acceptable to all the powers that are you know my favorite one Monday Monday there was a press conference here in San Antonio about the mission trail community mission trail community for those of you who are not from San Antonio was a mobile home park residents of people who lived there for a long long time just south of downtown San Antonio really on the near south side and some developer decided he was going to put a development in worked with the council members they did all kinds of this and the land owner sold the land and the people were removed from their homes Monday was a report on what their status is today some homeless some died of grief and just went on and on nobody cared what happened to the people nobody really cared all they cared about was a policy that gave that developer a shot building a nice high rise another high rise set of apartments for the millennials that are trying to attract San Antonio I don't want to denigrate the millennials my daughter is a millennial she would kill me if I were to talk like that but still she understands what I haven't said what's the status of that development now zero it's just a vacant lot I don't even know if their development is going to go in there but people's lives were destroyed because of some speculation that they were going to do something for economic development purposes those are the kinds of policies if you don't like that one how about Chavez Review you know where Dodger Stadium is Los Angeles Dodgers how many Latino communities were destroyed to put that stadium there three Latino Railroad workers they destroyed just a whole three huge barrios from there just to put that stadium in just so the Dodgers could have a nice place to play their game right it was economic development they used that promise to bring the Dodgers from Brooklyn, New York to Los Angeles, California to help build the economy of LA and you can go on and on and on you find a lot of these examples in economic development areas but you also find them in the worlds of education policy healthcare policy look at the policy surrounding drugs that deal with cancer or diseases that are very difficult that are very very very rare pharmaceutical companies aren't going to put a lot of money into them why they're not going to make any money on them so they just won't they produce them they produce them and they're extremely expensive and where's the government in all of this people's lives depend upon some of these drugs but then the government says this is free market free market, of course they're going to take care of all that sort of stuff but our health our health suffers so that's the third sort of filthy mechanism unfortunately the thoughts that I've talked about and presented to you today is really flute to thought it's like as I said before I started my presentation these are ideas that I've come up with and thought about over a long period of time throughout my academic career and the challenges are almost formidable but I've said the way to think about these are in long term in the long term there was a famous 19th century social activist and political economist one time was asked about how long does it take change to occur he says you know that's impossible to predict it could come tomorrow it could come in two weeks it could come in a month it could come in a year who knows the important thing is to just keep working at it working at it diligently working at it passion and just keep working at it and what we need to do is think about it in those terms passionately in the long range at all different types of levels in all different sectors education, political media whatever and it'll take time we can change the system but you know it takes a lot of energy it takes a lot of commitment and folks to just keep pushing and pushing and pushing thank you very much thank you prior to taking a short break five minutes stretch it's water etc I just want to mention and pick up on this last couple of words from Henry long term but I want to add to it when I said earlier and as we talked at the beginning introducing the symposium in terms of asking you to kind of set aside your focus day to day and part of that is connecting with what Henry said but I also still feel real strongly in terms of raising the question food for thought if you will as we get it later on into the breakout groups and discussion panels is are we working on the right priorities at the right time and in sufficient ways with even what resources we have and I know that's a hard question but I'm thinking of it if I'm not on media float down the street what are my priorities today is for media if I have food do I have insurance do I have a living wage so I would just as one example say how many of us here are fighting for a minimum wage that tomorrow has more immediate effect or at least 6 months from now or a year from now versus I know we're working in education and if we do it tomorrow that's great and we should be successful but that's a little bit more of a long term investment the term will come out and be influenced by that so it's just trying to strategize a little bit between that long term which we need to for that but also in terms of the short term and what can we match and how closely are we really in line with our media somewhere they're at I know we work day to day we deal from our perspective we know where our familiars are but I'm not always totally confident that we are relative to their priorities and what they deal with day to day and so that's just food for thought and why don't we take a short break take about 5 minutes and then I'd like to do a few summaries in terms of our discussion papers and move on to our panel