RIP: The Texas Economy is Overrated Myth

[ElNono]

And lol @ people uprooting from NY to go live there (link?)... other than retiring or winter Texan, there's no way in . The standard of living is somewhat cheaper, but the paycut is way more pronounced.

[Vici]

I wonder how many of those new jobs are going to stay. For my company, I know they are expanding here for now, but are planning to branch out throughout the rest of the country to tap a better, more qualified and smarter workforce.

[Vici]

And lol @ people uprooting from NY to go live there (link?)... other than retiring or winter Texan, there's no way in . The standard of living is somewhat cheaper, but the paycut is way more pronounced.

Most of the people in Austin are transplants. When I worked as a server while going to UT, about a third of all people I ID'd were from Cali.

[ElNono]

Most of the people in Austin are transplants. When I worked as a server while going to UT, about a third of all people I ID'd were from Cali.

Don't know about Cali, but the NY area sounds like BS, tbh.

[DarrinS]

And lol @ people uprooting from NY to go live there (link?)... other than retiring or winter Texan, there's no way in . The standard of living is somewhat cheaper, but the paycut is way more pronounced.

Two of my neighbors are CA transplants.

So when middle-class neighborhoods are being built, along with new schools, new strip malls, new office buildings, new movie theaters, new restaurants, new health clubs, new furniture stores, new home-improvement stores, new banks, new roads, etc. etc. etc., is it all to support the mass army of Walmart and fast food employees?

[ElNono]

Two of my neighbors are CA transplants.

And lol @ people uprooting from NY to go live there (link?)...

So when middle-class neighborhoods are being built, along with new schools, new strip malls, new office buildings, new movie theaters, new restaurants, new health clubs, new furniture stores, new home-improvement stores, new banks, new roads, etc. etc. etc., is it all to support the mass army of Walmart and fast food employees?

No other state builds middle-class neighborhoods, new schools, new strip malls, new office buildings, new movie theaters, new restaurants, new health clubs, new furniture stores, new home-improvement stores, new banks, new roads, etc. etc. etc?

Here's a reality check for you: 8% unemployment rate. About average for the country. There's no miracle, and you can't run away from it.

[DarrinS]

No other state builds middle-class neighborhoods, new schools, new strip malls, new office buildings, new movie theaters, new restaurants, new health clubs, new furniture stores, new home-improvement stores, new banks, new roads, etc. etc. etc?

I'm sure they do, but I'm just saying, as someone who routinely travels between SA and Austin, that there is a LOT of growth going on. And I see out-of-state plates constantly. Maybe they're all here to see the Alamo in 100 degree heat. No need to run from anything. Apparently, everyone's running to get here.

[DarrinS]

"Facts are perhaps difficult for the Democratic part"

[ElNono]

I'm sure they do, but I'm just saying, as someone who routinely travels between SA and Austin, that there is a LOT of growth going on. And I see out-of-state plates constantly. Maybe they're all here to see the Alamo in 100 degree heat. No need to run from anything. Apparently, everyone's running to get here.

I travel quite a bit from here to Texas too, and I see plenty of out of state plates around these places too. The unemployment rate is still , here or there.

If you actually had people uprooting and permanently moving there, you would actually see less out-of-state plates, not more. That's logical.

[DarrinS]

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-ec...data-released/

[ElNono]

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-ec...data-released/

How many of those are retirees? Let me guess, the overwhelming majority migrate to Florida... hmmm...

Never heard of the 'Florida miracle' (10.6% unemployment) or 'North Carolina miracle' (9.9% unemployment).

, New York unemployment is 8%, lower than any of those 2 states and Texas.

[boutons_deux]

Jimmy Ricky's job creation program:



http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/20...m-texas-style/

[boutons_deux]

21 Reasons Rick Perry's Texas Is a Complete Disaster

1. Texas leads the nation in the percentage of its population without health insurance (2010).

2. Only one state covered a smaller share of its poor population with Medicaid (PDF).

3. It's also number 1 in the percentage of children who lack insurance (2009).

4. Texas ranks dead last in the number of women who receive early prenatal care (2010).

5. It has the sixth highest rate of infectious diseases in America (2010).

6. It ranked 35th in the share of its children being immunized (2010)...

7. ...And 40th in overall health (2010).

8. Those numbers shouldn't come as a surprise – Texas had the ninth lowest level of health care spending per person (2010).

9. Texas ranked 36th in the nation in terms of its high school graduation rate (2010).

10. It has the lowest share of the population aged 25 and older holding a high-school diploma of any state (2008).

11. Its students have the sixth lowest SAT scores in the country (2008).

12. But Texas ranks fourth in terms of teen pregnancies (2005).

13. It's got the 16th highest crime rate (2010).

14. It ranks 17th in occupational fatalities (2010).

15. It's tied (with Missouri) for 19th in terms of the share of its citizens requiring food-stamps (2009).

16. It leads the nation in the amount of recognized carcinogens released into the air (2002).

17. Has the fourth highest amount of toxic chemicals in the environment (2002).

18. Texas’ per capita income growth was the eighth slowest of any state in the country between 1998 and 2008.

19. It ranks 47th median household net worth (averaged from 2007 to 2009).

20. Only seven states have a higher percentage of children in poverty (2010), and ...

21. ... Only nine states have a higher percentage of people of all ages living below the poverty line (2008).

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/152037

[boutons_deux]

Rick Perry And Sen. Grassley Promote Bizarre Myth About Non-Existent Tractor Regulation

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) about tractor regulations forcing farmers to jump through hoops:

He then proceeded to cite what he termed an “obscene, crazy” regulation. “If you are a tractor driver, if you drive your tractor across a public road, you’re going to have to have a commercial driver’s license. Now how idiotic is that?”

Perry said he had talked on Sunday night with U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa at a GOP dinner in Waterloo. Perry told Grassley he had heard in the previous two days that the federal government was going to put such a regulation in place.

“Your own United States senator, sitting there at the table, said, ‘That’s right.’ And I said, ‘What were they thinking, senator?’ And he said, ‘They weren’t.’ So that is the issue at hand here,” Perry said.

The only problem is this regulation simply doesn’t exist. “We are absolutely not requiring farmers” to obtain commercial licenses, said U.S. Department Of Transportation spokeswoman Candice Tolliver.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...gulation-myth/

====

Repugs, running on LIES and IGNORANCE.

[RandomGuy]

OVER the weekend, I predicted that Rick Perry will be a formidable candidate. Although many progressives are discounting him—see Kevin Drum's post on "Why Rick Perry Won't Win"—we can tell that many do take him seriously. The giveaway is that his announcement has inspired a rush of critical commentary about his record, particularly the vaunted "Texas Miracle" of job creation that will be central to Mr Perry's campaign in the primary and in the general election, should it come to that.

One of the major entries comes from Paul Krugman, in a column about the "Texas Unmiracle", which my colleague M.S. discussed yesterday. Mr Krugman writes:

...What you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.
It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending.
Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.

Texas's unemployment rate currently stands at 8.2%, which is a point below the national average, but nonetheless too high. That does complicate Mr Perry's claims to be some kind of economic magician, and more generally, as Mr Krugman suggests, some of the underlying factors and political decisions that have helped Texas through the recession can't be simply extrapolated to other states or scaled to the nation as a whole. However, I would suggest that in the rush to debunk Mr Perry, Democrats are being a little hasty. The Perry campaign is giving the startling statistic that since June 2009, 40% of the net new jobs created in America have been in Texas—a state with less than 10% of the nation's people. The Dallas Fed, earlier this month, reckoned that Texas created 261,700 jobs between June 2009 and June 2011, compared to 524,000 in the nation as a whole. Given the tremendous need for jobs in this country—and grinding unemployment is a horrible thing, not a minor inconvenience—it's a little disheartening to think that people are rushing to dismiss what has happened in Texas just because it's Texas and because Mr Perry, with his accent and his swagger, is the state's governor. So let's put politics aside. Pretend that Mr Perry doesn't exist, and that there's been a dummy stuffed with straw sitting in his office this whole time. What would have happened in Texas?

As Mr Krugman and others have noted, oil prices have helped buoy the economy. However, Texas is less dependent on oil and gas than it once was and the industry does not explain all or even most of the job creation. Another analysis from the Dallas Fed explains that between 1997-2010, a 10% increase in the price of oil would boost Texas GDP by 0.5%—and employment by a bit less, 0.36%, because oil is capital-intensive. Between 1970-1987, by contrast, a 10% uptick would boost the state GDP by 1.9%, and employment by 1%. According to Karr Ingram, an economist with the Texas Petroleum Ins ute, the Texas oil and gas industry added more than 28,600 jobs since June 2010, or about 13% of the state's net jobs in that span. It would also be fair to say that the oil and gas industry has impacts on Texas that are not captured in the traditional indicators. For example, Texas's longtime energy leadership has helped spur its interest in wind power, an industry where it now leads the nation. It may be counterintuitive, but there's a sense among state politicians that if Texas has the ins utional expertise to do energy, that should extend to renewables, too. In any case, we can see that oil and gas are important to Texas job creation, but hardly the whole story.

Mr Krugman's comment about surprisingly strict mortgage lending refers to regulations that were put in place after the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, which hit Texas pretty hard. The more general point is that in addition to Texas's natural resources, the state has a policy apparatus that predates Mr Perry and supports business—low taxes, generally few regulations (the mortgage lending being an exception), cheap labour, cheap land, etc. The state has also benefited from significant net population growth during the past decade, which has prompted job creation, including many of the service-sector "jobettes" that critics deride. Mr Krugman argues that population growth is down to "a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular." The comment about being attracted to Texas because of the warm weather suggests that Mr Krugman is on slightly shaky footing. It's a furnace right now. Some snowbirds come for the mild winters, but a lot of the in-migration is due to jobs—because companies have relocated here, because the military has expanded its footprint in Texas, or because people were looking at the unemployment rates and figured they would try their luck. It hasn't worked out for everyone, unfortunately. That's one reason why Texas's unemployment rate has jumped, too.

As for Mr Perry, since he does exist, what has he done? In his announcement speech he recited a four-part "recipe" for economic stewardship: low taxes, low regulation, tort reform, and "don't spend all the money." He actually hasn't cut that many taxes, partly because there wasn't much of a tax base to cut; Texas is one of the few states without an income tax, for example. His signature reform came in 2006, when he engineered a "swap" that lowered property tax rates—a constant complaint from homeowners—with the intention of offsetting those declines via an increase on the cigarette tax and a new margins tax on most businesses. Those new revenue streams haven't made up for the decline in property-tax receipts, so Republicans call this a net tax decrease and Democrats call it a structural deficit. More generally, what Mr Perry has done is resisted new taxes; here are a few counterexamples from Politifact. Similarly, he inherited a fairly minimal regulatory framework, but he does fight most new regulations, as in his lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency over its effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Mr Perry can take credit for a major tort reform passed in 2003, and a follow up "loser pays" reform earlier this year. Another thing in his toolbox—he doesn't talk about this—is that in 2003 the legislature established the Texas Enterprise Fund, a "deal-closing fund" that gives the governor subsidies and incentives to use in his efforts to woo, or if you'd prefer, poach businesses from elsewhere. This seems to deviate from free-market orthodoxy and it has exposed him to charges of crony capitalism, but it has also helped his administration create jobs.

Now, clearly, the virtues of this approach are debatable. It may be that cutting taxes and regulations and services is a good way to attract business but a bad thing to do, on balance, because it leaves you less money for health care and education and infrastructure—areas where Texas lags the nation as a whole, and indeed, if nothing else, areas where the state must do better if it is going to have a worthwhile economy in the future. And I certainly don't mean to endorse Mr Perry's approach; personally, I have a lot of problems with it, although I do think the unemployment rate is a key measure of social welfare. But if we're talking strictly about job creation, Mr Perry has a good pitch. He deserves partial credit for Texas's job growth, just as he deserves partial blame for the state's stagnation on other metrics.

A fairly even handed treatment, and pretty accurate as far as I lookeed up. The article itself has a lot of links to supporting material, if anyone is interested, I didn't bother with all the hyperlinks, as there were so many.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democ...8/job-creation

[RandomGuy]

Here is a link to Politifact's Texas edition:

http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/

[RandomGuy]

In addition to accusing the Fed Chairman of treason for doing his job, the one thing from Politifact that struck me was this turd:

Rick Perry says government wants to require commercial driver's licenses of anyone who drives a tractor across a road



It amounts to a rumor, a "rural legend" that the good Governor sucked up as true and repeated without subjecting it to any common sense fact checking.

I thought Perry was going to be a bit stronger of a candidate, but the dude is putting his foot in his mouth at every opportunity.

[DarrinS]

A fairly even handed treatment, and pretty accurate as far as I lookeed up. The article itself has a lot of links to supporting material, if anyone is interested, I didn't bother with all the hyperlinks, as there were so many.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democ...8/job-creation

Good article. Thanks.

[cheguevara]

21 Reasons Rick Perry's Texas Is a Complete Disaster

1. Texas leads the nation in the percentage of its population without health insurance (2010).

2. Only one state covered a smaller share of its poor population with Medicaid (PDF).

3. It's also number 1 in the percentage of children who lack insurance (2009).

4. Texas ranks dead last in the number of women who receive early prenatal care (2010).

5. It has the sixth highest rate of infectious diseases in America (2010).

6. It ranked 35th in the share of its children being immunized (2010)...

7. ...And 40th in overall health (2010).

8. Those numbers shouldn't come as a surprise – Texas had the ninth lowest level of health care spending per person (2010).

9. Texas ranked 36th in the nation in terms of its high school graduation rate (2010).

10. It has the lowest share of the population aged 25 and older holding a high-school diploma of any state (2008).

11. Its students have the sixth lowest SAT scores in the country (2008).

12. But Texas ranks fourth in terms of teen pregnancies (2005).

13. It's got the 16th highest crime rate (2010).

14. It ranks 17th in occupational fatalities (2010).

15. It's tied (with Missouri) for 19th in terms of the share of its citizens requiring food-stamps (2009).

16. It leads the nation in the amount of recognized carcinogens released into the air (2002).

17. Has the fourth highest amount of toxic chemicals in the environment (2002).

18. Texas’ per capita income growth was the eighth slowest of any state in the country between 1998 and 2008.

19. It ranks 47th median household net worth (averaged from 2007 to 2009).

20. Only seven states have a higher percentage of children in poverty (2010), and ...

21. ... Only nine states have a higher percentage of people of all ages living below the poverty line (2008).

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/152037

so Texas is like Mexico without the drug cartels and free healthcare

[clambake]

why would texas be building more schools?

[Agloco]

And I'm assured of getting my Mc-quarter pounder in a timely fashion. I vote status-quo tbh.

Damn, that's gotta be the worst burger you can buy tbh. It's must be 60/40 beef or something. Strange, since the rest of the McDonalds burgers suck much less.

To be fair, I can also get my Angus burgers in a timely fashion if I so choose.