Note: Cheer for the first day of school. 🙌🏻
On Monday, Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign dropped a Spanish-language ad rolling out something called “Protecting the Texas Promise,” his first real economic agenda of the campaign.
It’s actually really funny that he’s calling it the “Texas Promise,” since he was born in North Dakota and grew up in California. Transplants like Paxton don’t really know a lot about Texas. But I digress.
Pillar one of his plan is a $25,000 tax deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses, including insurance premiums, for every individual. Plus another $25,000 per dependent. So a family of four could theoretically write off $100,000 in medical costs.
Pillar two is a $50,000 deduction for first-time homebuyers, and another $50,000 down payment deduction if you’re moving to a new primary residence. Buy a house, get $50K off your taxes. Buy another house later, get $50K more.
Pillar three is a $5,000 deduction for “healthy lifestyle” expenses. Gym memberships, nutrition plans, GLP-1 medications, kids’ sports. Ozempic, but make it a tax write-off.
Pillar four is to make Trump Accounts permanent and double the Child Tax Credit.
All of this is silly, because it’s built mostly around deductions, which means the biggest dollar benefit flows to households that already have high taxable income and already itemize. A family scraping by on out-of-pocket medical costs and priced out of homeownership is the exact demographic least likely to see real money.
It’s basically the same way the Texas Legislature does business: Fuck the little people.
Paxton’s framing is, “every Texan should be able to buy a home, raise a family, and live a healthy life without the bills burying them.” Sounds like the kind of thing you’d hear from a candidate who’s spent the last decade fighting to make sure Texans have more bills to bury them, not fewer, which, funny thing, is exactly what Paxton has spent the last decade doing.
Anyway, it’s not a fiscally conservative platform. It never is with these folks.
But the bigger question is, who is paying Paxton?
The Jaffe family.
MS NOW’s reporting: the Jaffe family runs Jetran, a Texas aviation company that’s been in the business of acquiring and converting aircraft for nearly four decades. In 2016, Jetran was in talks to buy Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. The one people called the Lolita Express, the one Epstein allegedly used to ferry teenage girls and trafficking victims to his properties. Jetran walked away from the deal over “engine issues,” according to emails in the DOJ’s files.
A 2020 anonymous tip to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center names Doug Jaffe III. According to the FBI’s own log of the call, the tipster says Jaffe III invited them to a villa in Mexico in the early 2000s, co-owned by Jaffe’s aunt, where they saw a girl dressed inappropriately who Jaffe III claimed was his niece, a claim the tipster later says was false. The same tip alleges Jaffe III brought the caller to a club in Acapulco where underage girls were reportedly brought onstage and groped.
Jaffe III denies all of it. Told MS NOW he had “absolutely nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein or the Epstein files,” never met the guy, never heard of the tip. His father called the whole thing “someone trying to stir up shit.”
The point is what happened next. This spring, after the Epstein files were public, after everybody in Texas and everywhere else had a chance to read what was in them, a member of the Jaffe family cut a $3,500 check to the Paxton Cruz Victory Fund in April. A month later, in May, another $3,000 showed up in a separate FEC filing, tied to an address associated with both Jaffe men. That’s $6,500, after the files dropped, going straight into Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign.
Asked whether the campaign would give the money back, Paxton’s team didn’t answer.
This is coming on the heels of the controversy Paxton has been embroiled in over giving a plea deal to admitted child molester Adam Hoffman.
But the Jaffe family isn’t even the most lucrative relationship Paxton’s got going.
Back in February, Hood County asked Paxton, in his official capacity as Attorney General, whether Texas counties actually have the authority to block data center construction temporarily. Paxton’s public comment on the whole data center fight amounts to calling it “complicated” in a May interview.
Meanwhile, according to NOTUS’s review of FEC filings, Paxton’s political operation, his campaign, his leadership PAC, his joint fundraising committees, and the pro-Paxton super PAC Lone Star Liberty have pulled in at least $448,000 from data center executives and corporate PACs since last fall.
Some of that money should probably worry Paxton’s lawyers more than his opponents. On June 30, SAGO Energy LP, which is owned by an energy company that supplies power to data centers, wrote a $100,000 check to Paxton Victory. Corporations aren’t allowed to donate directly to federal candidates.
Tyler Winklevoss, of Gemini and Winklevoss Capital, kicked in $13,500 the same day SAGO did. Charles “Bubba” Saulsbury, whose company builds out data center infrastructure and who’s a well-known MAGA donor in his own right, gave $100,000 in June. William Kent, of Kent Companies, a data center construction outfit, gave $50,000 to Lone Star Liberty in May. CRH and Valero PACs each gave $5,000. Add in Laurie Harrison of Rosewood, Albert Huddleston of Aethon, Todd Platt of Hillwood, and a half dozen more, and you’ve got a client list.
Here’s the thing about all that money. Paxton needs every dollar of it. His Senate campaign has raised over $9.2 million total, but after burning through most of it, he entered the summer with $1.8 million cash on hand. Talarico, for comparison, is sitting on $21.5 million.
So there’s your other funding stream. Plain old pay-to-play. A sitting Attorney General takes nearly half a million dollars from an industry, sits on the one decision that industry actually needs from him, and Texas voters, who are turning against data centers in poll after poll, get to watch him call the whole thing “complicated” while the checks keep clearing.
Ken Paxton wants you to believe he’s the guy handing out $150,000 in tax deductions to Texas families.
It would really be wealthier, tax-paying families, not your average middle-class Joe. But, in reality, he’s the guy who took $6,500 from a family with an actual FBI file connecting a member to allegations involving a minor, and never said a word about giving it back. He’s the guy who took $448,000 from data center executives while sitting on the one decision his own office was asked to make about their industry, for six straight months, while Texans across the state watched data centers get built next to their neighborhoods with zero local say in the matter.
$6,500 from the Jaffes. $448,000 from data center donors. $9.2 million raised total, $1.8 million left in the bank, against Talarico’s $21.5 million. A pending decision that’s been pending for 182 days and counting. A tax plan with no pay-fors, no offsets, and no explanation of where a nine-figure-plus statewide price tag actually comes from. That’s what’s sitting in the FEC filings and on the AG’s own website, in black and white, for anybody who wants to go look.
Paxton is asking you to trust a brand new agenda he rolled out this week, in an ad aimed at exactly the voters his internal polling probably tells him he’s losing, funded in part by money he won’t explain and decisions he won’t make.
He’s betting you won’t check the math. I just did it for you.
This leaves Ken Paxton with a few questions.
Will he return the Jaffe money?
When does Hood County get its ruling?
And how, exactly, do his campaign promises get paid for? Republicans used to have an answer for this. Democrats definitely would.
Until then, the math ain’t mathing.
84 days until the November election!
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Such a crook. I am just going to keep saying: First Wives’ Club, biblical divorce mother f-er, that means you committed adultery. Pardoning pedos, using tax dollars to pay off his mistress, the only one more corrupt is currently occupying the White House.
How can you have deductions ?
Tx doesn’t have an income tax