Governor Jobs-Jobs-Jobs takes up civil rights.
The case against Rick Perry is political: In a field that includes George W. Bush’s kid brother, Rick Perry still manages to be the man who will remind voters of what they remember least fondly about the last Republican president, the metaphorical DNA of Texas politics superseding the literal DNA in Jeb Bush’s mitochondria.
The case for Rick Perry? Everything else. When oil prices collapsed last year, the familiar vultures gleefully awaited the unraveling of the Texas miracle, the remarkable economic performance that empowered Perry to boast (often) that nearly a third of the entire country’s net new jobs were in Texas during his years as governor. The vultures went hungry.
Last year Texas had the second-fastest-growing economy among the states, more than twice as fast as New York and nearly twice as fast as California. Growth will be a little slower this year, but not dramatically slower. Weak oil and a strong dollar are a brake on the state’s export-heavy economy, but there’s more than oil and gas in Texas: manufacturing, technology, and construction are picking up a great deal of the slack.
Texas’s unemployment rate stands a full point below the national average; unemployment is 48 percent higher in California and 33 percent higher in New York than in Texas, a fact rendered all the more remarkable by the state’s rapid, immigrant-heavy population growth.
The vultures have been disappointed before: In 2011, a drop in state tax receipts meant that the Texas treasury was tens of billions of dollars short of what state agencies wanted to spend. Perry got the usual advice: You must raise taxes, you must raid the rainy-day fund, and you must understand that cutting spending would ruinously de-stimulate the state’s economy. Perry instead demanded and secured $31 billion in spending cuts. The usual critics produced the usual squeals, but Texas’s economy thrived.Continue Reading…
Source: Rick Perry’s Race Speech — His Platform Isn’t Just Jobs | National Review Online
