Now that Dominionist Rick Perry has officially entered into the GOP presidential contest focus on what has really happened in Texas is growing - a trend that hopefully will continue to intensify. Why? Because when one looks at the real economic situation in Texas, it's something far different that what is being advertised by Perry and his sycophants. Yes, the gross job numbers look good - that is until you look at the types of jobs involved. And as for the policies that attract new businesses, they may be great for business owners but not for the employees and their families. An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at the real data behind what Perry would pretend he can bring to the nation as a whole, not that we'd want it or that it's even workable. Here are some highlights:
Rick Perry’s Texas is Ross Perot’s Mexico come north. Through a range of enticements we more commonly associate with Third World nations — low wages, no benefits, high rates of poverty, scant taxes, few regulations and generous corporate subsidies — the state has produced its own “giant sucking sound,” attracting businesses from other states to a place where workers come cheap.
Perry’s calling card in the presidential race is his state’s record of job creation at a time when the national economy floundered. Yes, Texas has created lots of jobs, though that’s partly a reflection of the surge in oil prices, which in turn created tens of thousands of jobs in the oil and gas industries. What Perry touts in his stump speech, however, isn’t the oil boom but, rather, the low-tax, low-reg, handouts-to-business climate that prevails in Texas. It’s the kind of spiel that businesses hear every day from leaders of developing nations — Mexico and, even more, China.
Consider the Texas that Perry holds up to the rest of the nation for admiration. It has the fourth-highest poverty rate of any state. It tied with Mississippi last year for the highest percentage of workers in minimum-wage jobs. It ranks first in adults without high school diplomas. Twenty-six percent of Texans have no health insurance — the highest percentage of medically uninsured residents of any state. It leads the nation in the percentage of children who lack medical insurance.
Consider his indifference toward education: . . . . when confronted with a $27 billion budget deficit, Perry did not raise taxes but instead slashed $4 billion from K-12 schools. In this regard, the equation of Perry with China’s leaders is unfair to China: The Chinese understand that the better educated their people become, the more high-skill and high-compensating jobs their nation will attain. No such understanding seems to have permeated Perry’s brain.
What Perry either ignores or doesn’t know is how greatly Texas has benefited from the investments and regulations of the federal government he despises. . . . The New Deal threw money at Texas, bringing it dams, highways and schoolhouses. The cumulative effect of policies such as the federal minimum wage has been to diminish the disparity that long existed between the industrialized North and the more poverty-stricken South.
Perry wants to unravel the national social contract and once again have us go state by state, with the low-wage, low-reg states dragging down the others, much as Chinese mercantilism has dragged down wages and living standards across the United States. He is the 21st-century, homegrown version of the Manchurian candidate.
As is increasingly the norm for Republicans, objective facts and a knowledge of accurate history and the true effects of government programs doesn't matter. It's all about sound bites and PR spin. It's scary and if not stopped is leading the USA long term to third world status.
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