. . . say its headline at the Chronicle:
(Michael Barone, "Low-tax Texas beats big-government California," Examiner, March 7, 2010 (emphasis added))
[Texas and California] differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress -- or lack of it -- over the last decade. California has gone in for big government in a big way. Democrats hold margins in the legislature largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.
Those Democratic politicians have obediently done the bidding of public employee unions to the point that state government faces huge budget deficits. . . .
Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009 . . . there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000 people from California . . . .
Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes -- and no state income taxes -- and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days ever two years . . . . Its fiscal condition is sound. . . .
But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid less than California's. But its test scores -- and with a demographically similar school population -- are higher. California's once fabled freeways are crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
In the meantime, Texas' [read Texas's] economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies large and small generate new jobs.
And Americans have been voting for Texas with their feet. From 2000 to 2009, 848,000 people moved from other parts of the United States to Texas . . . . Texas is on the way to gain four additional house seats and electoral votes in the 2010 reapportionment.
. . . . What's surprising is that Democrats in Washington are still trying to impose policies like those that have ravaged California rather than those that have proved so successful in Texas.
Guess which policies the Clever Ones at the Houston Chronicle favor?
Mocking Texas is a favorite sport at the editorial board. These folks intensely dislike our state as it is.
They think more like affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area than like, say, pharmacists from Spring, farmers from Muleshoe, or scout leaders from Bellaire. If they could make Texas over -- and they surely would like to do so -- it would be as New California.
That's why the Chronicle is so deeply invested in electing a Democrat as Texas governor. The newspaper's whole narrative about Texas politics over the next eight months will be aimed at that target, as demonstrated by the editorial of Monday, March 8. Criticism of candidate White's mayoral stewardship of Houston is little more than criticism of Houston itself, they say. And the press has a duty to protect Houston him.
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