Texas Miracle is Mirage

Texas miracle is actually a mirage

PAUL KRUGMAN

As expected, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, has announced that he is running for president. And we already know what his campaign will be about: faith in miracles.    Some of these miracles will involve things that you’re liable to read in the Bible. But if he wins the Republican nomination, his campaign will probably center on a more secular theme: the alleged economic miracle in Texas, which, it’s often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies.   And Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.

So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.   

It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending.

Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward, unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.    In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts.

By the way, 1 in 4 Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state’s small-government approach.  Meanwhile, Massachusetts has near-universal coverage thanks to health reform very similar to the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act.

So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.    For this much is true about Texas:It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990.  Several factors underlie this rapid population growth:   1) a high birth rate    2) immigration from Mexico   3)   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.

And just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a low cost of living.   In particular, there’s a good case to be made that zoning policies in many states unnecessarily restrict the supply of housing, and that this is one area where Texas does in fact do something right.

But what does population growth have to do with job growth?  Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels.   Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment.   At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas workforce keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.  

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America.   But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.

If this picture doesn’t look very much like the glowing portrait Texas boosters like to paint, there’s a reason: The glowing portrait is false.

Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole?   No.

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is, “Well, duh.”    The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition:

• Every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

In fact, at a national level, lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.    So when Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’ crippling drought.

Paul Krugman writes for The New York Times.

(We can always count on Krugman for clarity;   to see through to the core of things.  We have been given a lot to think about here. 

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As far as I can tell, Obama is the only one who continues to speak of creating the good-paying jobs Americans need.

He HAS had the good ideas and used to bring them up at every opportunity.  But between our own Democratic disharmony and the incessant refusal of the hard-right Republicans,  progress was never made.   As we have learned,  unseating Obama is the ONLY cohesive republican goal.  And ya know – – they are doing a fine job of closing in on their dream.  The man is so crippled.   Democrats are still divided and the GOP is already tasting blood.        

And it didn’t have to be that way!  But I am as guilty as any.  I am and will continue to be a ‘progressive’ with little patience for the Blue dog element who throttled our unity and thrust.    During my dragon-slaying years, I worked with numbers, so I get the fiscal responsibility thing.  But a set of books will never be on an equal level as running a country and all that that entails.

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I’ve had to choke back my disappointments with our leader. Bitterly so.  Unforgivably so.  Why so extreme?  Because I know that he had what it takes.  He is and was the whole package.  But he is not tuff enuff and seems to intensely dislike confrontation – in your face stuff.  Mr Compromise comes across as Mr Pushover.  His VERY loyal base saw this as a sell-out.  So what else is new?  2+ 2 will continue to make 4. 

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The hard-right has little concern for our planet.  In light of truth and science – that is criminal. (for we are ruing our “home” and we have nowhere else to go)   “Corporations are the same as people”  – especially  our constitution is against that thinking.  Not to mention our Lord Jesus who was rather stern in his teaching about wealthy men.. . .it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven.. . .or go, sell all you have (or give to the poor) and pick up the cross and follow me. . . .or  for that which ye do to the least of these, ye do unto me.  At the simple core of most of it. . .”judge not, lest ye be judged.”

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There is special angst to have to listen to politicians usurp attention in the name of the Lord (am a firm believer in the division of church and state), therefore nothing else comes across as deceitful as this.   I believe that if one loves the Christian God, one would read his pronouncements (the Bible – any version) and do the best one can to abide by the beauty and truth therein.  I am reminded of Matthew 6:6 after which he is admonishing not to act as the hypocrites do – that they may be seen of men . .let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth,  .  .  but thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father  which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

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An ethically moral person (includes every religion in the world) seldom speaks of the  special relationship with his/her maker, because this is a very personal,  intimate thing – sacred.  No need to defile, explain, bandy about etc. for any reason.  One wonders about those who find it important to loudly proclaim – who or what are they trying to accomplish?  Very questionable idiosyncrasy.

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You know, I’m wondering if we can toughen up our pelvic- floor muscles (as we seem to be doing), why can’t we perhaps advise our leader to try EFT to grow a pair, excuse me – – I mean to toughen his resolve and to realize that he not only has a right to pull rank and get tough, but an obligation to?  Life sure gets tegious, don’t it?  Jan)

New poet laureate – humanitarian voice

PROFILE

New poet laureate hopes to widen universe of verse

By Carolyn Kellogg LOS ANGELES TIMES

         JIM WILSON THE NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                                                                                      

Philip Levine, who was raised in Detroit, captures the American industrial heartland in his works.

Philip Levine, the Pulitzer Prize winner who was named the nation’s poet laureate last week, has spent much of his career listening and reflecting on the voices of America.   

In his new job, which will begin in the fall, he has one goal, he said.    “I want to bring poetry to people who have no idea how relevant poetry is to their lives,” he said from his home in Fresno, Calif., where he is a professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno.    He also hopes to bring some lesser-known poets into the limelight.

Levine’s writing career spans 60 years. Despite receiving many honors — the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts — he said he wasn’t prepared to hear that he would succeed W.S. Merwin as poet laureate.    “I was stunned,” Levine said — “especially at my age, at 83.”

Informed by his personal experience working in factories, Levine’s poetry focuses on the moments and textures of the day-to-day life of the working class. Robert Pinsky, another poet laureate, once described Levine’s plain-spoken poetry as having “the strength of a living syntax.”    Politics, particularly issues of class, thread through his poetry.    “My memories are an enormous store of situations, details,” Levine said.

Poetry connects by “having enough of the world in there to make the reader say, ‘Uh-huh, I know where he is.’”    David St. John, a professor of poetry at the University of Southern California who studied under Levine, called the poet “an American institution” and said, “This is a long-overdue appointment.    “He’s traditionally been one of the humanitarian voices, the voice of social and political justice in American poetry,” St. John said.

A sharp critic of the political environment, Levine remarked: “I had thought that the worst collection of people was an English Department having a meeting, but the U.S. Congress runs away with the award.”    Levine, born in Detroit, started working at industrial jobs when he was 14. He discovered poetry in high school reading “terrible” Stephen Crane, he told Mona Simpson in an interview in The Paris Review published in 1988.

The U.S. poet laureate is selected by the librarian of Congress in Washington. The duties and responsibilities of the poet laureate, who receives a $35,000 stipend, are largely ceremonial, but a poet who wishes to can undertake any projects he or she likes during his tenure. His yearlong term will begin in October.

(I wish there had been reference to the titles of some of his work.  With his background and sensitive ears and eyes,   I just know that I would very much enjoy reading him.   Looking forward to it.   Jan)