SO SAYS the Chronicle -- on page 1, no less. Breaking news and all that.
Who knew?
Well, Unca D, for one, along with every other sentient person in the reality-based community. Herewith a sampler of my posts on the Great Migration and reasons for the Great Migration, together with jokes about the Houston Chronicle -- the Goober Pyle of big-city newspapers.
March 9, 2009. Well, here's a news flash for the Chronicle: Nirvana is stone cold broke. The state has the highest state income tax in America and the highest state sales tax in America. California's plan for dealing with its own pending bankruptcy is to hike both. / This is perfect backwards thinking. Direct taxes and the implicit taxes embedded in the state's oppressive regulatory regime have deadened the economy, raised the cost of living, and created a public sector too large to control. People are leaving in droves.
May 28, 2009. THE HOUSTON Chronicle, a newspaper that serves the executives and worker bees of the petroleum and petrochemical industries, a newspaper in a relatively prosperous state that generally welcomes investors and those who choose to work (contra: see California), a newspaper with a traditionalist, largely conservative readership . . . yes, that newspaper last week climbed aboard the solar-powered choo-choo of President Obama's imagination and endorsed cap and trade.
June 26, 2009. [From a Wall Street Journal editorial:] So goes the real-life experience of progressive governance, with heavy tax burdens financing huge welfare states, and state capitals dominated by public-employee unions. Formerly rich states, [California, New York, and New Jersey] are now known for job losses, booming deficits and debt, wage stagnation, out-migration and laughingstock legislatures. At least Americans have the ability to flee these ill-governed states for places that still welcome wealth creators.
July 23, 2009. What the Chronicle misses, as always, is an opportunity for reflection. What is California doing wrong? Why is Texas faring so much better? Could the editors be wrong in perpetually criticizing, and laughing at, a state that serves its citizens so much better? / Readers get none of that, and never will. Our editorial board -- must I say it again? -- neither understands nor respects Texas. Not its people, its institutions, its processes, its politics, its economy, or its culture or traditional sensibilities.
November 9, 2009. Ten states are in financial peril, according to the Pew Center for the States. How many are named Texas? None, of course. But a lot of really cool states -- the kind that, like the Chronicle editorial board, sometimes refer to Texas as a laughingstock -- they're on the list. / California, naturally, is No. 1. / "The nation watches closely as California struggles to avoid going broke," Pew says.
March 12, 2010. [Quoting Michael Barone:] [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 [read 140 days] every 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 . . . .
March 18, 2010. [Mr. Anderson] ratchets up his message with an image of an incoming automobile -- a family moving here from California, perhaps? -- in which mama, papa, and a backseat munchkin are seen looking at the sign [about capital punishment] in puzzlement or, perhaps, horror.
July 10, 2010. Indeed, no Lisa Gray column or editorial is really complete without one of her signature insults to Texas and the horse it rode in on, and her tip o' old fedora to our betters in New York and California.
Nor did it help that in the U.S. [read United States], Ixtoc's oil washed up only in Texas, hardly a hotbed of environmentalism, and happy to rub its new [Unca D: new? new?] oil money in the rest of the country's face. Oil on Texas beaches? California and New York weren't crying.
August 13, 2010. California ranks fiftieth of fifty-one. Says Portfolio, "The employment bases of [the] bottom states have eroded at an alarming rate. California's loss of 950,300 private-sector jobs since 2005 is the equivalent of losing 520 jobs every day for five years.
November 1, 2010. A third [explanation for Texas's relative success] -- the Mark White model -- is more serious. It accepts that Texas is doing better than other states, but attributes Texas's better performance to luck -- high oil prices, for instance -- rather than, say, to having a legislature than meets only 140 days every two years, a constitution that sharply limits the power of government, and relatively low taxes, business-friendly laws and regulations, and a court system that largely respects the rule of law.
November 3, 2010. [The Houston Chronicle should ] assign a veteran reporter to look into the persistent rumor that Texas has a better economy than all or most other states. The analysis should answer these questions: / Is this true? What's the evidence? / If it's true, why? Luck, or something more? What do we do differently that may account for the strong economy? / What is the downside, if there is one, to having a strong economy and the policies that promote a strong economy?
July 5, 2011. TEXAS HAS the sixth-lowest tax burden among the states. So sayeth the Tax Foundation, based on data from 2009. The highest taxes are paid by (1) New Jersey, (2) New York, (3) Connecticut, (4) Wisconsin, (5) Rhode Island, (6) California, (7) Minnesota, (8) Vermont, (9) Maine, and (10) Pennsylvania.
September 9, 2011. [Quoted from Michael Medved:] BETWEEN 2009 and 2010 the five biggest losers in terms of "residents lost to other states" were all prominent redoubts of progressivism: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey. Meanwhile, the five biggest winners in the relocation sweepstakes are all commonly identified as red states in which Republicans generally dominate local politics: Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia. . . . / Fifty years ago, the United States saw a mass migration from east to west. Today we're witnesses a comparable migration from left to right.
September 29, 2011. The goal of the Clever People who run our local newspaper is not, as you might think, to understand why Texas works and why most of the rest of the country does not. It is not to celebrate that Texas works and most of the rest of the country does not. No. The goal of the Clever People who run our local newspaper is to make Texas less like Texas and more like the rest of the country. The goal is the fundamental transformation -- to borrow a phrase -- of our sweet state.
November 10, 2011. The Chronicle continues to struggle with the Texas Miracle. Does it exist? If so, what explains it? / A good newspaper would try to answer these questions. The Houston Chronicle never approaches them with an open mind. Rather it declares that the Texas Miracle does not exist and, inconsistently, that it is explained, at least in part, by things other than low taxes and a business-friendly legal and regulatory environment.
Now comes what Brother Rush calls "a random act of journalism" -- the aforesaid Chronicle front-pager about how -- gasp! -- people are actually moving from California to Texas. But notice the heavy frosting of snark larded onto the story and marked here in italics.
The food? Too heavy. The traffic? Not so bad. The weather? Don't get them started.
If it seems like half the people you meet are from California, you might be onto something. Census figures show more than 363,000 Californians moved to Texas over the past five years, helping the state [read Texas] grow more than twice as fast as the nation as a whole since 2000.
They came for jobs and for a lower cost of living. Some are drawn by love.
And although the transition can be rocky, many survive just fine.
(Jennie Kever," Census finds thousands of Californians flocking to Texas," Houston Chronicle, November 16, 2011)
Many survive just fine!
Well, that's a relief. From the Chronicle's perspective, you can see how mere survival in Texas is an open question. Still, many actually surive. Not all, mind you. But many.
And they say news stories at the Houston Chronicle sometimes reflect the bias of the elitist Clever Ones who run the joint.
For a more professional and balanced account of the same story, go to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Over the last decade, Texas' [read Texas's] population grew by 20.6 percent, far surpassing the national rate of 9.7 percent, to more than 25 million.
The biggest state-to-state shift last year was again from California to Texas (68,959 movers). . . .
Overall, Texas and California were at the opposite end of the coming-and-going spectrum in 2010, with Texas recording a net gain of 74,917 and California a net loss of 129,239.
Even better, the Startlegram found a California emigrant -- Church DeVore, 49 -- who not only survived but actually prospered. Gasp!
"I had to ask, 'How am I going to pay the bills and support my family?' I wanted an environment where next year is going to be better than this year. California is not that place," he said Tuesday.
He landed a job as a visiting senior scholar for fiscal policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin.
"But I was going to move to Texas regardless if I got this job," DeVore said. "In my opinion, the encomic climate in California is weak and getting worse, compared to Texas."
. . . .
"There's more to life than a pretty coastline, mountains and a benign climate. You need freedom and opportunity to be able to keep more of what you earn," DeVore said.
(Steve Campbell, "Fewer people move to new states, but Texas is still their top choice," Fort Worth Star-Telegram, November 5, 2011)
Welcome home, Mr. DeVore.
Now, what would it take to convince the Houston Chronicle editorial board to pack its latte machines in a U-Haul, send change-of-address forms to the Nation and Ms., and head for its spiritual home, San Francisco?
Comments