Government regulations, plastic bags

Austin American-statesmen about plastic bags  This link is an article about weighing the pros and cons to use plastic bags versus paper bags. In this article it seems that using paper bags is not such a positive outcome because plastic bags can be recycled, but the problem is that how many people really recycle plastic bags and put them in the recycle bin? I recycle a lot of items. I'm all about the go green movement helping out the world by doing my part. To solve this issue about banning plastic bags maybe a bit far stretched, I would encourage more your own special bags that you reuse over and over again because the government is already in so much debt that this simple ban of plastic bags would cost us too much money. We can save the earth later but this ban is not too much of a problem just maybe put a thirty second commercial of saying go green buy you own special bag with this happy shopper using her brightly covered see through bag. In the article it says that it takes much less energy to make then a paper bag but we should create a much more special bag made with different material thats much more robust. This might increase energy consumption for a short period but in the long period it would save us energy throughout the life of this earth. Our land fills won't need as much space and they won't fill up as quickly and we won't have to cut down as much trees. Trees is not really a issue because I heard from my physics teacher that they have plenty of pine trees to cut down but still having more trees is the right way to go because if we kept cutting down pine trees for paper our world would end up with only pine tree species and the other would go extinct but then again that is unlikely maybe in the next thousand years.

Texas Should Have The Right To Manage It's Own Money

My classmates article link from the Lone Star Blog
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/smith-let-texas-make-its-own-choices-1349387.html
I agree, Texas should be able to spend their money the way they want to but somehow Lloyd Dogget is so politically powerful that he prevented Texas getting $831 million from the federal government. The the national debt is about 13 trillion dollar so then 831 million dollars would be a small % of money that he denied so maybe that money could be of better use else where. Taking money from the "rainy day fund" for education is wrong its called the "rainy day fund" for accidents and natural disasters and funding more school programs is neither of them. Whats funny about Lloyd Dogget is that he wanted to increase the overall education spending in a time like this? I don't know where he gets his logic there must be a deeper reason for this but it does sound crazy to increase the spending for education and also taking it out of the rainy day fund sounds even more crazy.
I agree, I rather the federal government  go "in the hole" because those funds should be strictly for disasters like Hurricane Katrina or else the government would raise taxes as usual to build up the $3.5 trillion all over again. How corrupt could this government be if basically Lloyd Dogget had his way with the Texas spending budget especially with his logic sounds crazy unless I am misunderstanding something.