Facts and arithmetic.
From its peak in January 2008 through today, the United States has created 750,000 jobs. Texas created over a million jobs during the same period -- meaning . . .
. . . that the rest of the country . . . is still short 300,000 jobs. . . . From the bottom [of job losses] in February 2010, Texas produced nearly 1.4 million jobs and the rest of the United States created slightly more than 8 million. Texas grew employment twice as fast as [the rest of the United States]. . . .
. . . .
Without Texas, U.S. GDP would have grown about 2.1 percent in 2012 -- not the reported 2.5 percent. In fact, the growth of the Texas economy has outpaced the U.S. economy for some time. As a proportion of the U.S. economy, Texas made up only 7.7 percent in 2006. Today, it is nearly 9 percent. Consistently outgrowing the [rest of the country] has slowly built the Texas economy into the most pivotal contributor to the U.S. economy.
Since the peak of U.S. GDP in 2007, Texas has contributed 32 percent of all economic growth in the United States. That is an astounding number. From 2007 through the end of 2013, the U.S. economy grew by $702 billion, and Texas grew by $220.5 billion.
. . . .
This . . . helps explain why a Wall Street Journal poll found that 49 percent of Americans believe the United States is still in recession. Looking beyond Texas, there was no significant economic recovery. Without the Lone Star state, the United States has created no jobs and GDP is a mere 4 percent above its 2007 peak. Meanwhile the Texas economy has grown 19 percent.
. . . .
. . . . As the global economy searches for the next China, the U.S. economy should be searching for the next Texas.
(Samuel Rines, "Texas: America's Economic Miracle?" nationalinterest.org, retrieved April 7, 2016 (emphasis added))
Mr. Rines is identified as "an economist with Chilton Capital Management in Houston." He properly notes that the implosion of the oil economy has hurt Texas. But his main point stands.
The elites among us -- including those who run our very own Houston Chronicle -- are unmoved by these numbers and arithmetic. A greater principle is at stake, which fundamentally transforming Texas to make it more like the rest of the county -- particularly the workers' paradises known as California and New York.
For the record, Texas's relative outperformance is not the doing of George W. Bush, Rick Perry, or Gregg Abbott. It stems from our laws, our traditions, and our relatively limited state government.
What have we wrought? A functioning economy, if we can keep it.
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