“That’s right, in Texas they have part-time citizen lawmakers rather than a lot of professional politicians clogging up the scene all year round every single year.”
“. . . Texas dodged almost the full-brunt of the sub-prime lending crisis.”
Texas Grows 38% of Nation’s New BLS Jobs;
45% in REAL STATISTICAL Terms
Like the silly unemployment numbers used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measuring new job growth across the nation by BLS nonsense is a lesson in frustration. Nevertheless, according to BLS statistics since the financial meltdown ended (officially we’ve been recovering since June 2009) one state (Texas) has dominated the new job generation picture. 38% of all new jobs in the nation were created in Texas. So it took entire rest of the country 49 states and Washington, D.C. taken altogether to create the 62% of our new jobs that Texas didn’t create.
If instead of BLS statistics we use the far more accurate and straightforward non-farm payroll employment, Texas accounts for 45% of all new job creation. Texas, North Dakota, Alaska and Washinton, D.C. are the only areas to show a net job growth since the beginning of the meltdown. The District of Columbia, of course, benefitted from the huge growth in government size created by the Obama administration’s stimulus and regulation and new agencies (one law alone, Obamacare, created 384 brand new federal government agencies) programs.
Texas created roughly 72,000 more jobs, 266,000 in total) than the next two successful states (New York and Pennsylvania) put together and roughly 1,000 fewer jobs than the sum total of the other forty-seven states combined. This should come as no surprise since Texas is easily the most business friendly free market state in the union. These kind of figures are one reason that Texas Governor Rick Perry (though so far he’s UNannounced, is considered an important and necessary candidate in the Republican presidential polling).
Overall, eighteen states have lost jobs since the Obama-recovery began in June, 2009; California alone has lost 11,400 jobs. Thanks to Obama’s growth of government D.C. payrolls have increased 18,000 jobs since the meltdown began in mid 2007 compared to Texas’ 30,800 new jobs over the same period all the while the Lone Star State was eliminating government jobs and trial lawyer jobs (it’s harder for them to find work in Texas now due to new tort regulations that protect business and doctors from nuisance suits).
Besides the new tort laws, Texas has no state income tax. Its regulatory conditions are contained and flexible. It is fiscally responsible and government is small. Its right-to-work law doesn't impose unions on businesses or employees. It is always wide-open to global trade and competition. The words “government interference” are seldom heard in Texas where the state legislatute meets for roughly one-half year and then takes off the next eighteen months . . . that’s right, in Texas they have part-time citizen lawmakers rather than a lot of professional politicians clogging up the scene all year round, every single year.
Perhaps the single healthiest pro-jobs condition in Texas is the state rule in place since 1998, that limits mortgage borrowing to 80% of the appraised value of the home. Like a large minimum down payment, this reduces problems associated with over-leveraging and means Texas wasn't hurt nearly as badly by the housing crash as other states. So Texas dodged almost the full-brunt of the sub-prime lending crisis. Think about these five facts (the next five paragraphs) . . .
In 1975 before the Carter administration created the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA ’77) the questionable loan rate in the country was 0.24% of all home mortgages offered at 3% down payment or less (Texas, now, you’ll remember is requiring 20% minimum). The nation was largely operating as a free market in the home mortgage industry.
By 1985 with ACORN operating mainly only in one medium-sized state, Arkansas, (ACORN in those days stood for Arkansas Community Organizations For Reform Now) forcing mortgage lenders there to make knowingly bad loans in accord with CRA ’77 . . . the suspect loan rate more than doubled to 0.51%. ACORN was, of course, the driving force also for putting Bill Clinton into the governor’s mansion in Little Rock for 12 of the next 14 years and into the Oval Office after that. Except for Arkansas, the nation was still operating as a free market with regard to home mortgages.
After three legislative expansions in Washington (one by G.H.W. Bush; two by Clinton), a huge regulatory expansion of CRA ’77 by Clinton in 1993, and ACORN being expanded across the whole nation: the suspect loan rate jumped to 14.1% in 1995. ACORN was very busy, including a Chicago-area ACORN attorney named Barack Obama who was shaking down banks to make ever more bad loans and even to get ACORN donations from them. ACORN now had it’s present meaning of Associations of Community Organizations for Reform Now and operated in all fifty states. The free market in home mortgages is wiped out.
About the same time as Bill Clinton was paying off his friends at ACORN for their support in 1998, by passing the steroid version of CRA ’77 expansion . . . Texas, with George W. Bush as governor, is wisely passing a 1998 law requiring a minimum of 20% down payment on all home mortgage loans. With ACORN’s push, Clinton’s law allows 0% down payments from people without jobs whose only “income” is food stamps. Even illegal aliens are now being put into $440,000 homes by ACORN with less effort than they needed a decade earlier to put better-qualified (but still UNqualified) loan seekers into $110,000 homes. By 2005, the suspect home rate is 34% across the nation. A large percentage of these new loan recipients are getting NO-Down payment loans.
The G.W. Bush administration first tries in January, 2005 to pass a law repealing CRA ’77 but Democrats block it. Finally thirty months later after nineteen speeches on the subject and other direct appeals to Congress, Bush and a bi-partisan group pass a weakened version of Bush’s 2005 bill into law in July, 2007. It helps immensely to save the housing market from utter collapse, but is way too little, way too late to stem the tide of nasty side effects and the financial meltdown begins within three months. The fifteen year long government-created housing bubble is ended.
Let’s sum this up: why has Texas prospered during this great downturn and mediocre “recovery?” Texas has, in a phrase, stuck to real core American values when the rest of the nation was throwing the U.S. Constitution out with the “wash water” and engaging in the wildest unjustified financial hokus-pokus imaginable. Let us learn our lesson from Texas’ wisdom. As the former “Lone Star State,” Texas is the only state with the legal-power to secede from the Union at will . . . we need about forty-nine other states to follow her lead and to uphold the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights . . . if the UNITED States is to prove worth saving.
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
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