After the big announcement at Saturday’s Redstate Conference in Charleston, South Carolina where Governor of Texas Rick Perry declared his candidacy for president, liberals have been quick call out and bitterly denounce the “Texas Miracle” as fraudulent.
Some of the big-hitters of the left have come out with critical articles trying to prove that the phenomenal growth and resiliency of the Texas economy is a fallacy and offers only false hope.
Heavy hitter number one, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, concludes that, “what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition.”
Krugman thinks that the Texas Miracle comes, “Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.”
High growth in population, plus high oil prices, and what he considers a “surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending,” are the factors that he believes have been the main contributors.
So basically he is trying to say that essentially luck and a somewhat liberal Texas policy are the fuel that supplies the fuel for the engine of both the Texas and the American economy.
Somehow, according to Krugman, these fortunate and entirely random conditions have allowed a state that has less than 10 percent of the country’s population to create over a third of all jobs created in America since June, 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal, that amounts to 265,300 net jobs created in Texas out of the 722,200 jobs created nationwide.
In downplaying the success of the Lone Star State Krugman points to the very liberal Massachusetts.
Krugman said, “By the way, one in four 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 the problem with Texas is ultimately that it doesn’t conform to Krugman’s ideas about the welfare state and “social justice.” Nobody is talking about the Massachusetts or California miracle, because the only things miraculous occurring in those states is the squandering of their natural advantages in geography, being located on the two dominant coasts and the crippling impact of tax-and-spend policies in those states.
Paul Begala also chimed in on Sunday, claiming that Perry is basically a dummy who received poor grades in college and claims, like Krugman, that Texas is simply a product of luck. In fact Begala jabs at Perry and Texas by saying, “Texas does in fact lead the nation in minimum-wage jobs and in both the number of people who are uninsured and the percentage of the population that's uninsured.”
Even though Krugman and Begala both claim that the Texan economy is a farce and unfair to poor people, the data is clear that on top of producing jobs for locals the state is the top destination for domestic migration. As the great free market economist Milton Friedman once said, “People vote with their feet.”
The attacks on Texas by the most prominent liberals show how much they fear a Perry candidacy and the success of conservative ideas in Texas. The triumph of the Texan economy will ultimately be seen as a triumph of conservative ideas.
No wonder liberals have been so quick to undermine the “Texas Miracle”.
