The argument is that the Texas economy has held up better than most of the rest of the country because of factors outside the influence of State government, and that, Rick has redirected State funds away from schools and social services to corporate interests with dubious results in job creation. The first part I am sure of, the second part, I'd like to see the number on. The effect on the school system is pretty well documented. I have often stated that Bull Clinton benefited from the dotcom boom and would not have had a budget surplus without it. Disruptive changes in technologies create value. Tens of thousands of Texan's collected up to $25K an acre for their mineral rights creating hundreds of mint new millionaires, there is a boom in day rates for rigs, supplies of pipes, roughnecks, housing in San Antonio and Ft Worth, new motels and restaurants etc. etc. Rick just happened to be the Governor when directional drilling and shale frac-ing has become feasible and a vast new resource has been discovered.
Uh..wow you are serious. Suffice to say, your logic that "states that add population have a harder time adding jobs" - is kind of ridiculouls, to put it mildly, or else we'd expect to see states that are hemorrhaging people with declining unemployment. You been to Detroit lately? How about central Ohio? West Virginia? What...no jobs there...really? I really hope the "it's not fair to look at unemployment %!" in big states applies to the US as a whole, because then Obama's record is Zeus-like.
So wait, our population growth has outpaced our job growth? Is that how we explain this gap between "Texas added the most jobs" and "Texas' unemployment is relatively high"? And isn't it already pretty well known that Texas was insulated from the economic collapse due to the industries we're centered around (and more importantly, the ones we're *not* centered around)? It looks like Perry deserves about as much blame for the unemployment bump as he deserves credit for the relatively weak effect of the collapse and subsequent recovery. The next time a Texas Governor does anything of consequence for this state besides affect college football conference alignment will be the first.
Actually Texas' population growth, since a lot of it is from babies/children, doesn't really hurt it that much as far as the actual Household survery unemployment stats go since unemployment only tracks the workforce, whcih doesn't include these groups. WHere they hurt it is here, the ratio of non-farm employment to total population: which is why it's lower. But anyway, you can't really see Texas doing much trend-bucking from this data set, though a slight delay in the employment collapse is apparent (overhang from high commod prices in 2008 I'm guessing)
http://www.politicalmathblog.com/?p=1590 When we finally get the data, we discover that energy isn't really the biggest part of the Texas economy. Increases in jobs in the energy sector (or closely related to it) account for about 25% of the job increases in the last year. Since the energy sector only makes up 3% of all employment, there is some truth to this claim. However, take the energy sector completely out of the equation and Texas is still growing faster than any other state. This indicates to us that the energy sector is not a single sector saving Texas from the same economic fate as the rest of the states. It's not hurting, but Texas would still be growing like a weed without it.
http://www.politicalmathblog.com/?p=1590 But if Texas has so many jobs, why do they have such a high unemployment rate? Let's take a closer look at that data. ... We can see that Texas has grown the fastest, having increased jobs by 2.2% since the recession started. I want to take a moment and point out that second place is held by North Dakota. I added North Dakota to my list of states to show something very important. North Dakota currently has the lowest unemployment rate of any state at 3.2%. And yet Texas is adding jobs at a faster rate than North Dakota. How can this be? The reason is that people are flocking to Texas in massive numbers. ... Texas isn't just the fastest growing... it's growing over twice as fast as the second fastest state and three times as fast as the third. Given that Texas is (to borrow a technical term) f***ing huge, this growth is incredible. People are flocking to Texas in massive numbers. This is speculative, but it *seems* that people are moving to Texas looking for jobs rather than moving to Texas for a job they already have lined up. This would explain why Texas is adding jobs faster than any other state but still has a relatively high unemployment rate.
Again, by this logic, Michigan would be leading the universe in job creation. It's really not that hard to look at Texas job growth in the last 10 years - we can look at its 8.2% unemployment, middle of the pack, and be pretty accurate in saying that it has been middle of the pack. Why? Because it has been middle of the pack. We don't have to invent idiotic theories like "WELL ITS IMPRESSIVE IF WE ADD IN ALL THE POPULATION AND TAKE THE NET AND SUBTRACT THE GROSS AND BLARGHY BLARGH BLARGH." - the numbers don't lie: 8.2%.
Wouldn't that logic imply that Michigan's unemployment rate would be decreasing (or at the very least, slowing down)? I don't think having a net population loss (of unemployed people) is meant to imply job creation.
On job creation most states look like this: Texas looks like this: http://www.politicalmathblog.com/?p=1590
You just did. The data doesn't lie The dumb assumption that the Perry backers are making here, that you are making by incorporation, is that the UE survey and population growth measure the same thing...they don't at all. UE survey is of the labor force. POpulation growth is of population growth. sigh. Let's take the Net of all states (top number) and compare it to a single state(bottom number). This is the same idiotic spectacle that we saw Republican governors engage in a few weeks ago, where the governors of Wisconsin and Minnesota each claimed responsibillity for creating 66% and 50% of all new jobs created.... A more accurate graph would be to take the MEDIAN state net jobs created number and compare it to Texas. Of course, that doesn't account for population growth, like the unemployment rate does. We know where Texas...and it's 8.2% unemployment...compares here. 24th. above the median...!
more wood for the fire from thinkprogress -- REPORT: Texas Ranks Dead Last In Total Job Creation, Accounting For Labor Force Growth Data for this post was compiled by Matt Separa, Research Assistant with the Economic Policy Team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), since he launched his presidential campaign on Saturday, has paraded around the stat that “since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America.” “Now think about that. We’re home to less than 10 percent of the population in America, but 40 percent of all the new jobs were created in that state,” Perry says. This stat leaves out a lot of the story. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has promoted the number, but “it acknowledges that the number comes out different depending on whether one compares Texas to all states or just to states that are adding jobs.” Between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than in Texas. In fact, “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” The unemployment rate in Texas has been steadily increasing throughout the recession, and went from 7.7 to 8.2 percent while the state was supposedly creating 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S. How is this possible, since Texas has created over 126,000 jobs since the depths of the recession in February 2009? The fact of the matter is that looking purely at job creation misses a key point, namely that Texas has also experienced incredibly rapid population and labor force growth (due to a series of factors, including that Texas weathered the housing bubble reasonably well due to strict mortgage lending regulations). When this is taken into account, Texas’ job creation looks decidedly less impressive: Clearly, there is no miracle for Texas here. While over 126,000 net jobs were created in Texas over the last two and a half years, the labor force expanded by over 437,000, meaning that overall Texas has added unemployed workers at a rate much faster than it has created jobs. And although states like Michigan have lost jobs (29,200 since February 2009), the state’s labor force has shrunk by over 185,000 since then. As a result, while there are fewer jobs, there are significantly less workers looking for them. As Paul Krugman put it, “several factors underlie [Texas'] rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular.” But they have little to do with Perry’s policies. Now that certainly doesn’t make the situation in Michigan a good one, as contraction of the labor force is one side effect of the prolonged recession and unemployment there is still 10.6 percent. However if there is a real “miracle” here, it is North Dakota, which has seen over 27,000 new jobs and a labor force expansion of only 3,700, resulting in about 24,000 new jobs for workers who previously had none. But no one is proclaiming the “North Dakota miracle” and saying that Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R-ND) should be running for President.
Texas' population is growing very rapidly both from a birth standpoint and relocation standpoint, no? I must have missed a chart or graph somewhere that explained this.
I posted this earlier: North Dakota currently has the lowest unemployment rate of any state at 3.2%. And yet Texas is adding jobs at a faster rate than North Dakota. How can this be? People are flocking to Texas in massive numbers. This is speculative, but it *seems* that people are moving to Texas looking for jobs rather than moving to Texas for a job they already have lined up. This would explain why Texas is adding jobs faster than any other state but still has a relatively high unemployment rate.
I don't really see the validity of this. Why should a growing labor force (i.e. unemployed people moving here en masse) reflect negatively on Texas' job record? Just because we have people moving here doesn't mean we're going to instantly have jobs for all of them, in fact, this graphic explains the gap between "Texas has high job growth" and "Texas has growing unemployment" quite well. Apparently we're adding jobs, but we're adding unemployed people faster. Granted, they're probably crappy jobs with the worst benefits imaginable.
Why should vernon maxwell's massive number of 3pt FGA reflect poorly on the number of 3 pointers he actually made! The point is he added 3 pointers, when North Dakota wasn't adding them at all!
I guess if Vernon Maxwell wasn't actually in control of the 3 pointers he shot, that might be an appropriate comparison. (Although on some nights, Maxwell may very well not have been in control of his actions...)
