A proud native Texan, Angela is a resident of McKinney where she has lived, served, and raised a family for over two decades. She was born on Valentine’s Day 1963 in New Braunfels, Texas, and was adopted and welcomed into her new family the day after her birth. She was raised in Mansfield, TX, where her father worked at Bell Helicopter and her mother was a teacher’s aide.

Angela attended Baylor University, where she earned a degree in Mathematical Science and became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She continued her graduate studies and earned and Masters in Education from the University of Houston – Clear Lake.

An educator by profession and passion, Angela Paxton has 22-years of experience in public and private schools as well as homeschooling. As a teacher, she’s previously taught pre-calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and college algebra. After five years of teaching math and mentoring high school students at Legacy Christian Academy, for the past six years she had the privilege of working with the LCA families as a school guidance counselor.

Angela and her husband, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, met at Baylor University. They have been married for 31 years and have four grown children: Tucker, a software engineer; Abby, a 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Air Force at Goodfellow Air Force Base; Mattie, a junior education major at Texas A&M; and Katie, a freshman nursing major at Texas A&M.

A pro-life conservative, Angela has been an outspoken defender of the unborn, and her personal story of adoption was published in McKinney Women Making a Difference. The Paxton’s attend Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano.

Tom Giovanetti is president of the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), a public policy research organization based in Dallas, Texas. Prior to joining IPI in 1992, Mr. Giovanetti was a freelance policy writer and the director of product development for a small manufacturing company in Dallas, where he designed several patented products and gained real-world experience in how taxes and regulations affect small business.

Mr. Giovanetti writes for IPI and for other publications on a wide variety of policy topics including tax reform, intellectual property, Social Security personal accounts, communications policy, Internet governance, education reform, the broadband revolution, and out-of-control government spending. In addition to being published in leading papers including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Investor's Business Daily and The Dallas Morning News, he also appears regularly on a number of radio and television programs.

Mr. Giovanetti represents IPI many national and international organizations, including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where IPI is an accredited NGO. IPI was also accredited as an observer organization with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), where he argued against UN involvement with Internet governance, and with the UN's Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Mr. Giovanetti also participated during meetings of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property, and represents IPI as a stakeholder during trade agreement negotiations such as the current Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

AUSTIN, Tex. — Call it the season of Texas’ discontent. Of course there was Hurricane Harvey, which blasted the coastline, leaving cities flooded and an estimated $180 billion in damage. But Harvey is just the headline.

There’s also the dysfunctional, ideologically driven State Legislature, which spent the last weeks of this year’s session debating, of all things, who gets to use which bathroom. Then there’s the oil and gas sector, which, as it has so many times before, expanded into a bubble and then, as global energy prices sank, popped, taking thousands of jobs with it.

Texas’ woes are interconnected. Rising energy prices allow politicians to take their hands off the legislative wheel. Less attention to smart, controlled growth at the state and local level allowed unchecked sprawl along the coast. And now declining revenues will make it harder for the state to address its very real needs, assuming the Legislature can get its act together.

When it comes to job creation, Texas is the place to be in 2017. Austin was recently named the best city for job seekers in 2017 by NerdWallet while Texas has remained the leading state when it comes to job creation since 2007, adding more than 1.8 million jobs. There are more and more companies moving to Texas, which can be a mixed bag of news for current Texas employers.

“Overall, broad indicators of the Texas economy continue to point toward moderate growth in the months ahead,” says Keith R. Phillips, Dallas Fed assistant vice president and senior economist. “With the stabilization of the energy sector and some recent improvement in the manufacturing sector, the Texas economy is on solid ground and will likely improve moderately in 2017.”

The health of Texas' poor is worse - at times significantly so - than those who live in two Southern states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

A report Wednesday in Health Affairs, a health policy journal, examined four years of medical outcomes in Texas, Arkansas and Kentucky and found that health measurements in the latter two states, both of which expanded Medicaid, dramatically improved in nearly all categories.
Most Popular

The improvements included steep drops in the uninsured rate among the poor, less reliance on emergency rooms for routine care and fewer people skipping their medication because of cost.

The Texas Legislature closed out the special session Tuesday night amid a stalemate on property tax reform, leaving unfinished Gov. Greg Abbott's top priority.

The Texas Legislature closed out the special session Tuesday night amid a stalemate on property tax reform, leaving unfinished Gov. Greg Abbott's top priority.

Hours earlier, the House abruptly adjourned sine die – the formal designation meaning the end of a session – after advancing a school finance compromise to Abbott's desk but declining to further negotiate on a key property tax proposal. When the Senate returned later in the night, it rejected the only remaining option to get the bill across the finish line, which was to accept the House's version.

Legislative leaders looking to create better training to prevent sexual harassment will likely face a roadblock if they want to get lawmakers in the room.

Top Texas lawmakers have called for reviews of sexual harassment policies at the state Capitol following reports detailing how current procedures offered little protection for victims. Proposed solutions have included better training aimed at preventing harassment and informing victims of their rights.

But legislative leaders will likely face a roadblock if they want to force lawmakers into any sort of anti-harassment training: They can’t require it of individual legislators, some of whom were behind the worst behavior recounted to the Tribune.