Posted on 07/11/2009 7:45:54 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
AMERICA’S recent history has been a relentless tilt to the West—of people, ideas, commerce and even political power. California and Texas, the nation’s two biggest states, are the twin poles of the West, but very different ones. For most of the 20th century the home of Silicon Valley and Hollywood has been the brainier, sexier, trendier of the two: its suburbs and freeways, its fads and foibles, its marvellous miscegenation have spread around the world. Texas, once a part of the Confederacy, has trailed behind: its cliché has been a conservative Christian in cowboy boots, much like a certain recent president. But twins can change places. Is that happening now?
It is easy to find evidence that California is in a funk . At the start of this month the once golden state started paying creditors, including those owed tax refunds, business suppliers and students expecting grants, in IOUs. California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, also said that the gap between projected outgoings and income for the current fiscal year has leapt to a horrible $26 billion. With no sign of a new budget to close this chasm, one credit agency has already downgraded California’s debt. As budgets are cut, universities will let in fewer students, prisoners will be released early and schemes to protect the vulnerable will be rolled back. They paved paradise and put up the parking taxes
Plenty of American states have budget crises; but California’s illustrate two more structural worries about the state. Back in its golden age in the 1950s and 1960s, it offered middle-class people, not just techy high-fliers, a shot at the American dream—complete with superb schools and universities, and an enviable physical infrastructure. These days California’s unemployment rate is running at 11.5%, two points ahead of the national average. In such Californian cities as Fresno, Merced and El Centro, jobless rates are higher than in Detroit. Its roads and schools are crumbling. Every year, over 100,000 more Americans leave the state than enter it.
The second worry has to do with dysfunctional government. No state has quite so many overlapping systems of accountability or such a gerrymandered legislature. Ballot initiatives, the crack cocaine of democracy, have left only around a quarter of its budget within the power of its representative politicians. (One reason budget cuts are inevitable is that voters rejected tax increases in a package of ballot measures in May.) Not that Californian government comes cheap: it has the second-highest top level of state income tax in America (after Hawaii, of all places). Indeed, high taxes, coupled with intrusive regulation of business and greenery taken to silly extremes, have gradually strangled what was once America’s most dynamic state economy. Chief Executive magazine, to take just one example, has ranked California the very worst state to do business in for each of the past four years.
By contrast, Texas was the best state in that poll. It has coped well with the recession, with an unemployment rate two points below the national average and one of the lowest rates of housing repossession. In part this is because Texan banks, hard hit in the last property bust, did not overexpand this time. But as our special report this week explains, Texas also clearly offers a different model, based on small government. It has no state capital-gains or income tax, and a business-friendly and immigrant-tolerant attitude. It is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other state—64 compared with California’s 51 and New York’s 56. And as happens to fashionable places, some erstwhile weaknesses now seem strengths (flat, ugly countryside makes it easier for Dallas-Fort Worth to expand than mountain-and-sea-locked LA), while old conservative stereotypes are being questioned: two leading contenders to be Houston’s next mayor are a black man and a white lesbian. Texas also gets on better with Mexico than California does.
American conservatives have seized on this reversal of fortune: Arthur Laffer, a Reaganite economist, hails the Texan model over the Gipper’s now hopelessly leftish home. Despite all this, it still seems too early to cede America’s future to the Lone Star state. To begin with, that lean Texan model has its own problems. It has not invested enough in education, and many experts rightly worry about a “lost generation” of mostly Hispanic Texans with insufficient skills for the demands of the knowledge economy. Now immigration is likely to reconvert Texas from Republican red to Democratic blue; Latinos may justly demand a bigger, more “Californian” state to educate them and provide them with decent health care. But Texas could then end up with the same over-empowered public-sector unions who have helped wreck government in California.
Second, it has never paid to bet against a state with as many inventive people as California. Even if Hollywood is in the dumps (see article), it still boasts an unequalled array of sunrise industries and the most agile venture-capital industry on the planet; there is no prospect of the likes of Google decamping from Mountain View for Austin, though many start-ups have. The state also has an awesome ability to reinvent itself—as it did when its defence industry collapsed at the end of the cold war. Perhaps the rejection of tax increases will “starve the beast” and promote structural reform. A referendum on a new primaries system could end its polarised politics. Mr Schwarzenegger’s lazy governorship could come to be seen not as the great missed opportunity, but as the spur for reform.
Fifty laboratories, one magic formula
The truth is that both states could learn from each other. Texas still lacks California’s great universities and lags in terms of culture. California could adopt not just Texas’s leaner state, but also its more bipartisan approach to politics and its more welcoming attitude towards Mexico. There is no perfect model of government: it is America’s genius to have 50 public-policy laboratories competing to find out what works best—just as it is the relentless competition of clever new firms from Portland to Pittsburgh that will pull the country out of its current gloom. But, to give Texas some credit and serve as a warning to Mr Schwarzenegger’s heir, at this moment America’s two most futuristic states look a lot more like equals than ever before.
Well, keep some of those liberals up there would ya? Tell them it’s really really hot and our property taxes are stupidly high. And it never snows. And we’re all racist rednecks. Maybe they’ll stay up there. ;-)
Rick Perry is a double-edged sword-—but he’s better than KB Hutchison, who has become a RINO after being in Washington so long.
The legislature is just barely Repbulican, in the house it is 79 to 71 in the senate it is 20 to 11.
Not quite correct....
Currently it is
House 76-74 GOP
Senate 19-12 GOP
Thank you for correcting it.
Alas, what “world class” Universities we do have in Texas are getting as corrupted and as useless as the U of Cali system. How UT strangled a Western Civ program:
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/07/texas-mugging-of-western-civ.html
The biggest thing that bothers me about your state is this: Why are they arresting people in bars for drinking? I would expect that kind of thing in certain states, but Texas?? Texas seems like a great place, no need for a police state antics!
“The first thing, get rid of the year-round professional legislature and return to a part time legislature such as meet for a month or two each year.”
It’s amazing how much bad legislation is slowed down solely because the Texas lege meets only once every 2 years and is required by law to quit after 5 months (June 1 is end of session).
Sunset laws are good too.
That is one rattler...........
We ought not be totally pessimistic on this front.
Blacks and latinos even in Texas are conservative-leaning like the state. If the GOP figures out how to get the minority vote share of conservative minorities, they will survive just fine.
Pass Amnesty though, and all bets are off.
I don’t know what you’re talking about...I know plenty of people who safely drink in bars without being arrested.
“If the GOP figures out how to get the minority vote share of conservative minorities, they will survive just fine.”
They won’t even try that. They’ll keep being Democrat-Lite and they will try to help Obama pass amnesty. They continue to live down to Sam Francis’ label of being The Stupid Party. Only a tsunami of anger from the American people will stop amnesty.
By what calculus, you liberal puke?
Looks like The Economist is now overrun with the kind of liberal mushheads pushing damp squibs that they used so drily, and correctly, to deplore.
What a bag of mush.
God save Texas from liberals and Tejano Democrats!
Anything you can think of to persuade liberal pukes to give Texas a pass, and move to New York or Kally-foahn-yuh instead, I'll sign and endorse.
We uncool! Don't know how to sign and signify, nor clock, nor represent! Duh!
Almost makes you hope Chia Head gets the Bomb, doesn't it?
That may change for California, too.
Imagine immense, Alaska-like ice storms and gales, blizzards even, lashing northern California for week after week, as they do in Alaskan winters nowadays, while the once-pleasant California winters migrate down the coast to Ensenada and Cabo.
Do you have room to park crew-served weapons?
Education changed the abortion debate and education is what is needed to change the debate about conservatives and liberals. Conservative democrats in small towns are electing Democrats. Liberal urban dwellers are electing Democrats - soon there will be no market for the Republican...in the red blue challenge.
This could play a role in the upcoming redistricting after the 2010 census. I think the senate will remain GOP but who knows how the house will turn out. The other factor in the senate is that under the rules it requires a 60% agreement to bring any item to the floor. Thus from that standpoint it becomes important.
There is a large group of Texans who belive that the secretary who was present at the creation of the Texas Constitution was somewhat dyslexic and wrote down that the legislature must meet for 140 days every two years instead of the two days every 140 years that was intended!
;>)
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