FIVE REASONS WHY THE TAB’S REPORT ON THE TEXAS PRIVACY ACT WAS RATED ‘MOSTLY FALSE’
A Texas Association of Business report against the Texas Privacy Act (Senate Bill 6) was rated “Mostly False” by the Austin American Statesman’s PolitiFact staff. Key legislative leaders are now calling on TAB to rescind their faulty report which falsely claimed SB 6 would cost Texas up to $8.5 billion and around 185,000 jobs.
In reality, SB 6 is good for the economy. It defends the dignity and privacy of all Texans in intimate facilities in schools and government buildings. The bill protects private businesses from local government laws dictating restroom, locker room, and changing area policies.
Below are five reasons from the PolitiFact ruling on why TAB’s report should be disregarded.
- The Houston Super Bowl did not move (obviously)
“… [O]ther elements were shaky. One projection, for instance, rests in the Super Bowl set for Houston on Feb. 5, 2017 being moved to another state.
- Anonymous study authors
“We were barred from talking to the people who made the projections. … [St. Edwards University] students who did the study had signed non-disclosure agreements prohibiting additional commentary.”
- Undocumented figures (documentation ‘… is long gone’)
“… Indiana’s legislature voted to allow businesses to refuse service due to objections on religious grounds. After negative reactions, the study notes, legislators amended the law to blunt its effect on LGBT residents. Still, the study says, the economic impact was calculated as $1.5 billion in short-term losses alone … we found an April 2015 WNDU news story attributing the $1.5 billion figure to an Indiana legislator, Terri Austin, quoted saying that she’d talked to industry professionals ‘… so I didn’t just pull them out of thin air.’ … [A] staff spokesman for Indiana’s Democratic House caucus … said documentation of the figure, if any, is long gone.”
- Fuzzy math based on a typo
“The Texas study says that if a similar law passed in Texas, the estimated impact could reach $8.5 billion. How so? ‘Given that the Texas travel industry has a $31 billion annual impact, a 15 percent reduction would result in an overall loss of $8.5 billion,’ the study says, ‘or 0.5% of the State GDP, the same percentage GDP loss experienced by Indiana’ [following that state’s passage of a religious freedom law] … We didn’t see a study source for the stated $31 billion annual impact of the Texas travel industry […] the ‘15 percent’ reduction was a typo that should have said ‘0.5 percent’ …”
- Bad comparisons to unrelated laws
“Another [flawed premise] extrapolates Texas losses from research rooted in Arizona’s immigration law — not that state’s failed proposal … vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer, allowing businesses to deny services on religious grounds …”