"Don't Mess With Texas" - What Scares Liberals About The Texas Economy

In the last two days, since Texas Governor Rick Perry declared his candidacy for President of the United States, we have received numerous queries from friends who know that the two sisters are not only opinionated, but Texas residents as well, albeit one is a "Winter Texan."  To be truthful, we are not "experts" on Rick Perry.  We are learning more about him as we are about the others.  Having not ever considered him in the context of presidential candidate we need to begin thinking of him as such.  We've been studying and reading about the other GOP candidates as well.  Unlike the 2008 race, there is only one contender on the Democrat side and unfortunately, we know entirely too much about him. 

This article appearing in today's Weekly Standard online, is one that we've read in our quest to learn more about how Rick Perry would translate his experience as Texas Governor into the Presidency of the United States. 

Two Sisters

Don't Mess With Texas's Economic Record

Rick Perry's entrance into the presidential race scares liberal critics.

by MARK HEMINGWAY 

One surefire way to tell that Rick Perry's entry into the presidential race is having a big impact is the sheer number of hit pieces that have been written against him in a 48-hour period. (See here, here, here, here...I could go on.)


I'm sure some of that is due to an oppo dump from other GOP candidates hoping to step on Perry's momentum. However, there's one theme from liberals that I suspect you'll hear a lot of, a la the latest Krugman column, which is the furious accusation that Texas' low taxes and business-friendly regulation haven't really created a lot of jobs:

• What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state

Krugman's paragraph here explains a lot about why "Keynesian" should probably be a bigger slur than "former Enron adviser." For one thing, job creation is not a zero-sum game. Texas hasn't created over 40 percent of the country's new jobs just by taking them away from other states. A lot of those jobs wouldn't exist, period, if Texas didn't create a tax a regulatory climate to encourage them -- Texas added 732,000 jobs in the last decade, and no other state created more than 100,000. If Krugman's unimpressed, that's because he's the one that's trading in fallacies here.


Further, it's revealing that Krugman offers up only the most facile comparisons between Texas and blue states. In a single sentence, he brags about Massachusetts unemployment rate and high rate of health insurance relative to Texas, when both states are significantly below the national average in unemployment. Further, Krugman doesn't note how significant differences in demographics or immigration might affect employment in these states. And Krugman sure as heck isn't going to mention this:

• State officials have successfully increased health insurance coverage in the state: With only 2.6 percent of the population now lacking health insurance, its insurance rate is the highest in the nation. But high coverage levels have been achieved at a substantial price, and one that is expected to increase over time.
• For the state’s policymakers, rapidly rising health-care costs are the central problem with the plan. Since 2006, the cost of the state’s insurance program has increased by 42 percent, or almost $600 million. According to an analysis by the Rand Corporation, “in the absence of policy change, health care spending in Massachusetts is projected to nearly double to $123 billion in 2020, increasing 8 percent faster than the state’s gross domestic product (GDP).”

This isn't exactly a surprise, but Krugman's being spectacularly dishonest here. He also fails to mention that Texas has twice closed massive budget deficits under Perry's tenure as governor -- without raising taxes. The fact that Texas has its fiscal house in order, unlike just about every other blue state, surely has something to do with Texas' economic growth. The reality is that just about every other blue state is a governing basket case when compared to Texas, and the comparison is revealing and instructive.


"Government isn't difficult in theory," Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry told National Review in 2009. "Don't spend all the money, keep taxes low, have a fair and predictable regulatory climate, keep frivolous lawsuits to a minimum, and fund an accountable education system so that you have a skilled work force available. Then get the hell out of the way and let the private sector do what the private sector does best."


Perry doesn't have a Nobel Prize in economics, but despite Krugman's sophistry, I suspect that American voters know common sense when they hear it.

© Copyright 2011 The Weekly Standard LLC

White House Gases

by  Peter Jay O'Heyne

I just watched my home heating oil delivery truck leave my driveway and along with it about $600 for 160 gallons of fuel; this, after topping off my car at $3.55 a gallon with my bag of price-inflated groceries in the back seat. Now the media won't do it, electronic, printed or otherwise, so I will: thank you President Obama for the destructive, anti-growth policies that have caused my heating, food and gas prices to soar even as my home’s value plummets.

I am sure that there are those Obama apologists who will point to the chaos in the Middle East as the cause for the skyrocketing oil prices. While the recent unrest has had some minimal effect, the most significant factor has been increased oil demand worldwide. Proof of this is the fact that industry analysts were predicting $4 a gallon by summer and as high as $5 next year, months before the current Middle East upheaval.

The fact is that the Obama administration is repeating the mistakes of Jimmy Carter’s failed energy policies, which defined his term and were a significant part of the “misery index” of the late seventies. Some of us are old enough to remember the gas lines during the Carter administration and family members taking turns getting up before dawn to be the first in line. Well get your alarm clocks out, Obama’s policies are leading us straight into another national energy disaster.

Mr. Obama’s energy policy is a hodgepodge of green Utopian ideals; not really bad but not really practical either: more biofuel production, electric vehicle production and renewable power production. These are simply disastrous policies. The primary source of biomass production is corn-based ethanol which produces less energy per unit than gasoline while contributing to food price increases. Taxpayers subsidize ethanol production to the tune of $4 billion a year while producing only 2 percent of the total gasoline supply. The electric car is prohibitively expensive and like so many things this administration does, is unwanted by the vast majority of Americans. The other sources, wind and solar, contribute less than 1% to power generation and have no effect on the supply of gasoline. The environmental efficacy of ethanol is dubious as is the electric car; after all, that car must plug in and recharge using electricity likely supplied by a coal-powered generator.

In the face of all this, most prudent leaders would ramp up our own energy resources mining. In fact, the Obama administration has done the opposite and forcefully moved to cut our domestic energy supplies. The Interior Department has canceled scores of oil and gas drilling leases in the Green River Formation alone, where there is estimated to be more than three times the reserve of recoverable oil than Saudi Arabia. In the aftermath of the BP spill in the Gulf of New Mexico, the administration issued two bans on drilling, logic akin to grounding all air travel due to a single crash. Obama also refuses to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and has stopped off shore drilling in California, Florida, Texas and Louisiana. Not only has he shut off oil supplies, he has also cost these states thousands of jobs. I could go on, but you get the picture.

The greatest threat to America’s environment is not green house gas but rather the noxious White House gas that spews propeller beanie energy policies. The Obama administration’s anti-oil and ant-natural gas posture is destroying our economy and heading us inexorably towards a full blown energy crisis that will make the Carter years look like a walk in the park. It is also a national security issue since it renders us vulnerable to the whims of America-hating regimes sitting on foreign oil reserves. Surely the president can see this as clearly as anyone, so it begs the question, why isn't he taking action; isn't national security and a strong economy and energy independence priority one for the President? He says that it is. It’s time Mr. Obama’s actions speak as loudly as his words.

  © Copyright Peter Jay O'Heyne 2011