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Title: The sad facts behind Rick Perry’s Texas miracle
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URL Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini ... 11/08/16/gIQAxc3zJJ_story.html
Published: Aug 17, 2011
Author: Harold Meyerson
Post Date: 2011-08-17 14:05:55 by Skip Intro
Keywords: None
Views: 5236
Comments: 15
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. Texas has an inordinate number of employers who provide no insurance to their workers, partly because insurance rates are high, thanks to an absence of regulations. Perry seems quite comfortable with the state’s lagging performance in what we might term the pursuit-of-happiness index. Consider his indifference toward education: In 2008, the state comptroller found that 12 percent of Texans lacked high school diplomas and that the level would rise to 30 percent by 2040 unless the state’s commitment to education was considerably increased. This year, though, when confronted with a $2741;billion budget deficit, Perry did not raise taxes but instead slashed $441;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. In one significant particular, though, Perry’s policies fairly ape the Chinese. Over the past eight years, the state has given businesses nearly $500 million in grants and financial incentives to help them expand. Perry’s economic vision is the kind of race-to-the-bottom mercantilism we’ve come to expect from developing nations in the globalized economy, although, as China, Brazil and India illustrate, many such nations have begun to provide citizens with more schooling and better jobs as they grow wealthier. No comparable developments can be seen in Rick Perry’s Texas. Now Perry wants to take his model national. In “Fed Up,” his campaign manifesto, he says the federal government has gone too far by passing laws “regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, [and] creating national minimum wage laws.” These are all endeavors, he argues, that should be left to the states. I could understand how a governor with a good record on providing medical insurance, for instance, could argue that his state’s plan is one the nation should emulate. But when the governor of the state with the highest level of medical uninsurance calls for dismantling the national programs and letting states go their own way, that’s industrial-strength chutzpah. 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. He grew up, he tells all who will listen, on a small, hardscrabble Texas farm. But it was Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration that brought electricity to those farms, which, left to the mercies of the market, would have remained dark for decades. 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.
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#1. To: Skip Intro (#0)
Exposing Perry.... 1. He's a big beneficiary of big-government Perry's No. 1 talking point as a presidential candidate is job creation in Texas. He claims correctly that Texas has created more than one-third of all jobs in the country since the economic recovery began in mid-2009. What he doesn't mention is that virtually all of that job creation was in government, not in private industry. Translation for Republican retards = He is a hypocrite. 2. The "Texas Miracle" is unraveling Texas has been able to delay the kinds of sharp cutbacks in government payrolls and services that most other states have been forced to undertake, partly because of a strong energy sector that helped sustain the state's tax revenues during the early part of the recession. But Texas now seems poised for steep cuts in government services, just like many other strapped states. Translation for Republican retards = By supporting the smaller govt kooks in the GOP he screwed his own state's growth. 3. What's good for Texas is bad for America's drivers When oil and gas prices rise, the Texas economy gets a big boost. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, every 10 percent rise in oil prices boosts annual economic output in Texas by half a percentage point, and employment by 0.36 percentage points. Translation for Republican retards = Texas is in league with OPEC (When OPEC does well so does Texas). 4. He sounds clueless about monetary policy Perry's first pronouncement on the Federal Reserve as a presidential candidate was a convoluted mouthful of economically illiterate posturing. When asked his opinion of the Fed, Perry said of chairman Ben Bernanke, "If this guy prints more money between now and the election ... we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous—or treasonous." Translation for Republican retards = He might not sound stupid to the Republican cult members that don't listen to anyone other than their own kind but to the rest of the nation, including the big players in business, he sounds like a rube hick.
With the economy still in the dumper -- maybe permanently? -- and full-time jobs becoming as scarce as rain during a drought, huge percentages of Americans have had their (misplaced) faith in the American dream shaken, the upper-middle-class consumerist lifestyle is exposed as a mirage for anybody who plays by the rules. Capitalism and the America that embraced it as a way of life is now and forever more a failure. It does me good to know that the generation that voted in Reagan and his ideology will see their America die from that ideology before their very own eyes and knowing they had a hand in its destruction.
This guy has to be Rush Limbaugh's dream candidate. If he'd only provide a state subsidy to multi-millionaires, Limbaugh would probably move there.
Most of the new jobs in Texas since the economy crashed under Bush were govt jobs. Texas = socialist pretending it is not. Like Republican gays who pretend they are straight. I call it the Yukon delusion.
With the economy still in the dumper -- maybe permanently? -- and full-time jobs becoming as scarce as rain during a drought, huge percentages of Americans have had their (misplaced) faith in the American dream shaken, the upper-middle-class consumerist lifestyle is exposed as a mirage for anybody who plays by the rules. Capitalism and the America that embraced it as a way of life is now and forever more a failure. It does me good to know that the generation that voted in Reagan and his ideology will see their America die from that ideology before their very own eyes and knowing they had a hand in its destruction.
. Funny SH!T Goober! Perry is one of YOURS goober. BUT we CONSERVATIVES aren't fooled. Herman Cain is coming down the road right at YOU goober. Who ya gonna call goober? YOUR little failed man child messiah "king" obammy is TOAST goober. You better run Hitlery in the primary against him if you hope to have ANY chance goober. "Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ... LMAO!!!!!!!!!!
Spoiled, stupid and ignorant, brain dead phuckwads, libTURD fools, tools, and idiots, are the real sickness; the messiah "king" obammy and his regime are only the symptoms.
Rut Roh.. now you've gone and done it. The Vallejo whorehouse Mad Dog and the Boris with a Y, will be by, Showing why their candidates always lose.
The more I see these stupid articles the Libtards are posting about him, the more it convinces me they are scared to death of him and need to double their daily lithium dosage..... (just bought more lithium stocks last week and they are up almost 10%)..... LOL.....
When asked by a Liberal what I bought my Granddaughter for her 1st birthday I replied, "MORE AMMUNITION"!!!! -----------------------------"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
Really? You mean there are companies that just make lithium? I see you've got a personal interest in the matter.
LOL! It's true. Lord knows who will end up last standing. But, it better be an actual conservative or the repukelican't party will be destroyed. I guess that doesn't really matter anyway, if the wee little failed man child messiah "king" obammy is re-elected the USA is seriously and critically in danger of ceasing to exist. So the odds are this will be our last chance to STOP this feral gooberment and it's cadres and whores. At least peacefully.
Spoiled, stupid and ignorant, brain dead phuckwads, libTURD fools, tools, and idiots, are the real sickness; the messiah "king" obammy and his regime are only the symptoms.
. You really are a foul little libTURD idiot aren't you Skippy poo poo? (AGAIN Skippy poo poo, THAT'S a "rhetorical question", We ALL already know that you certainly ARE a foul little libTURD idiot). Your lithium is supplied to you through welfare isn't Skippy poo poo?? Or does your mommy buy it for you Skippy poo poo ? LMAOAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Spoiled, stupid and ignorant, brain dead phuckwads, libTURD fools, tools, and idiots, are the real sickness; the messiah "king" obammy and his regime are only the symptoms.
I've really got to ask you this question. Are you an advocate of GENOCIDE and DEMOCIDE. I ask this because either you are or I have cracked open more history books and history sites on the internet than you have. The ONLY way big government ever "works" is for it to kill off enough people for racist or other reasons (like "global warming" carbon footprints) so that it doesn't have to support a large slave popupation and these mass killings always start with "gun control". Instances of this: Before our genocidal attacks on Native American tribes laws were pased to make trade with Native American tribes in Winchester Repeating Rifles (The weapon that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse used in their trash job on General Custer's 7th Cavelry and essentially the "assault weapon" of the 19th century) illegal and punishable by death. (You DON'T hear about this aspect of the Native American genocide from Ward Churchill, probably because he is an anti gun socialist like you.) Before the "Young turks" killed off all the Armenian Orthodox Christins they could get their hands on during World War I they passed a series of "reasonable" gun registration and "special needs only" licensing laws and eventually revoked the permits essentially outlawing all formerly legal guns in turkey. Before the Stalin era democidal "purges" in the Soviet Union in general and the DELIBERATE PLANNED FAMINE in the Ukraine Soviet Dictator Stalin Revoked permits and outlawed the possession of all guns in the Soviet Union. (Lenin did allow some gun ownership on the same old "reasonable special needs" permit basis.) Before the concentration and death camps went up in Nazi Germany the Nazis passed a gun law that seemed lax on its surface (but still required "special needs only" permits for handguns and militarily effective firearms). This law was used as a basis for confiscation through permit revocation. Nations that fell under Communism after World War 2 also followed this procedure of imposing "special needs only" licensing on loose surplus firearms and confiscating them before putting their dissidents in death and concentration camps. Both Nationalist and Communist China also followed this same proceture of licensing and then confisacting guns before killing off substantial parts of their populations. The same Procedure was followed by several regimes in Third World Countries with both Left and Right wing regimes. Guatamala, Niqueragua under both the Somoza and Sandinista rigimes, El Salvidor, Argentina, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Ruanda and Zimbabwe and the Sudam are the most infamous for this gun licensing, gun confiscation and then kill off the hated part of the population scheme. Like or not this is the HISTORY of "gun control" regulation around the world and throughout time. Now you may say that England, France, Sweden (or name any other socialist Eurpoean country other than Germany, Russia and Turkey) has "gun control" and has never had a Genocide or Democide. Well over half the people who use tobbacco products never get cancer, heart disease or any other tobbacco related disease either BUT that does not change the evidence that tobbacco use a primary cause of these diseases. Neither does nations with "gun guntrol" and no genocides/democides change the evidence that "gun control" Is ALWAYS a prelude to these events. Because of this I feel I have the right to question your motives in supporting it.
By the way, is your real name BOB BECKEL by any chance. You seem to be just about as SNOOTY and ARROGANT as FAUX Snooze's new "Liberal" former booze hound media whore that at least partially replaced their "Conservative" former booze hound media whore GLENN DRECK.
Bingo!! Nice call CSnake
I see you've got a personal interest in the matter. Would anybody have recognized what I was talking about if I would have used these names....... Fluoxetine, Paroxetine, Sertraline, Olanzapine, Aripiprazole, Risperidone, Ziprasidone or Clozapine........ Probably not.... So why not use a name that everybody recognizes, it gets the point across that much better.... My personal interest in this matter is Capitalist in nature. I might as well make some money off of those on the Left who are starting to implode in record numbers. They've taken enough of my tax money over the years why shouldn't I return the favor..... The truth be known I would just as soon they use this instead....... As I hold stock in ammunition manufacturers too...... When asked by a Liberal what I bought my Granddaughter for her 1st birthday I replied, "MORE AMMUNITION"!!!! -----------------------------"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
Yes, it's how limited govt America back then cleared the land of Indians. I don't want to give back the land to the Injuns. Do you? It's amazing how limited govt America back in the day wiped out the Indians without much Federal tax dollars.
With the economy still in the dumper -- maybe permanently? -- and full-time jobs becoming as scarce as rain during a drought, huge percentages of Americans have had their (misplaced) faith in the American dream shaken, the upper-middle-class consumerist lifestyle is exposed as a mirage for anybody who plays by the rules. Capitalism and the America that embraced it as a way of life is now and forever more a failure. It does me good to know that the generation that voted in Reagan and his ideology will see their America die from that ideology before their very own eyes and knowing they had a hand in its destruction.
Excellent post!!!!!
When asked by a Liberal what I bought my Granddaughter for her 1st birthday I replied, "MORE AMMUNITION"!!!! -----------------------------"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
#2. To: Godwinson (#1)
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.
#3. To: Skip Intro (#2)
#4. To: Gooberloserton (#1)
#5. To: Godwinson (#3)
Texas = socialist pretending it is not. Like Republican gays who pretend they are straight. I call it the Yukon delusion.
#6. To: Mad Dog (#4)
"Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...Thery're coming to take him away ...
#7. To: CZ82 (#6)
(just bought more lithium stocks last week and they are up almost 10%)..... LOL.....
#8. To: CZ82 (#6)
The more I see these stupid articles the Libtards are posting about him, the more it convinces me they are scared to death of him and need to double their daily lithium dosage..... (just bought more lithium stocks last week and they are up almost 10%)..... LOL.....
#9. To: Skippy poo poo Intro, CZ82 (#7)
#10. To: Godwinson (#1)
(Edited)
The FARO RESERVE BANK!!! 
#11. To: Godwinson (#1)
The FARO RESERVE BANK!!!
#12. To: Coral Snake, Godwinson (#11)
By the way, is your real name BOB BECKEL by any chance.
#13. To: Skip Intro (#7)
Really? You mean there are companies that just make lithium?
#14. To: Coral Snake (#10)
(Edited)
Are you an advocate of GENOCIDE and DEMOCIDE.
#15. To: Coral Snake (#10)
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