Daily Kos looks closely at Rick Perry’s Texas Miracle and discovers that it’s more of a Stimulus Miracle:
Despite being one of the loudest critics of President Obama’s stimulus, Perry used billions of dollars of federal money to patch Texas’ budget shortfalls, and was thus able to create and maintain lots and lots of public sector jobs. In fact, if you look at net job creation between 2007 and 2010, it’s clear the only thing keeping Texas buoyant was government jobs…it added 125,000 public sector jobs — nearly half of all government jobs created in this period nationwide.
Perry, it turns out, is excellent at soaking up federal government money like a particularly thirsty sponge and then taking all the credit for it. Hunter at Kos goes on to theorize that Perry is a triumph of Keynsian economics. I bet if Perry knew what those words meant, he’d be outraged.
See, I told you that Obama just needs to kill the Bush Tax Giveaways to the Rich and cancel subsidies to the inefficient tax-subsidized Red States ….
Perry is sounding more and more like LBJ!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37966380@N0…
I already have relatives posting their pro-Perry horseshit on Facebook, so until I block them all, I’m going to keep posting these tidbits.
How’s that saying go? All hat, no cattle?
This has already been discussed elsewhere. Public sector jobs in Texas has tracked population nearly exactly for the last 20 years. Texas added a lot more government jobs than other states because it added a lot more people than other states.
Why has it added a lot more people? Birth rates are a factor, but don’t explain it all. Additional factors: (1) Cost of living is very low — average mortgage debt is less than the price of new car. (2) It has done better than most other states at private sector job growth.
@5 You’re right. But. Teaxs has done better at private sector job growth for one main reason: Oil (and natural gas).
I think it would be fair to calculate into our economic assessments of Texas all the sweetheart deals, special treatment, and corporate welfare the oil industry has gotten from the Federal government for the last fifty years.
David, Texas has done “better” because, if you can recall, the price of oil jumped to $145/barrel not too long ago.
That has since changed rather dramatically, and nat gas prices have been historically low. The recent Texas economic “miracle” will crater in the next 12 to 24 months due to federal stimulus dollars drying up, the Texas state legislature’s inability to realistically deal with its significant budget deficits, and the resulting lack of significant tax revenues coming into Texas’ state coffers.
All those minimum wage jobs created in the state in the last 5 +/- years are just not a a good source of tax revenue.
Believe me. It is going to get pretty ugly rather soon in the Lonestar State, David.
Right vers Left and you still don’t get they are sleeping together?
Now that the supposedly public airways are owned by five families, owning the supposedly independent press, but you’re still listening to the mumbo jumbo story lines.
Theater people, just pure theater, and if you don’t wake up and smell the coffee or nation will be further torn apart. This is just the intent. To balkanize the nation, which in a sense is what they have done with politics. We can all see the disasterous consequences, and it is rather clear to me that this is organized.
Republicans pushing for jobs under the banner of private enterprise, but through the funding source of the public treasury, and enriching the rich. Deomocrats backing ideas fundamentally antithical to ideals of liberty such as gun control, complete idiocy proven at the cost of more than 60 million lives since world war II, and yet you are still voting for these two parties, still discussing them as viable political platforms?
Professional politicans, corporate elites, central private banks, 47 million families, not people, on food stamps! Complete destruction of the industrial base. War as an economic policy to support a petro based dollar? Yet you still talk about these people like they were even aware or had a clue? Global Warming Lies and mass disinformation or complete lack of information,
What is amazing is that so many of you seem to think that politicians are even running the joint, because if you ask me they look like employees of someone else. Wake Up!