Okay, but you don't want to be too dependent on oil. Wasn't there an energy bust in the 80s that hit Texas hard? Also, isn't most of the oil shale people are talking about actually located elsewhere? Texas may have the corporate offices, but that may not count as much as the actual resource.
Did you realize that the port of Houston is the second most active in the US and the expansion of the Panama anal is only going to increase Houston’s impact.
That expansion sounds painful.
Combine Houston, New Orleans and Mobile, and you control the flow of energy, food and manufactured goods into the US.
Okay, but if you change one thing in a system you may alter the whole system drastically. If Houston is the 2nd busiest port in the US, what happens when it's no longer in the US? Will trade reroute to other cities?
Houston is rapidly becoming the financial capital of the country. New York and California will remain the major players in name only.
Banking is becoming decentralized (or recentralized). North Carolina and Georgia may give you a run for your money. Even places like Minneapolis or Washington DC have a shot. And foreign centers may dwarf all of them.
But finance is mobile. What happens if Texas isn't part of the US? And for manufacturing -- Texas can produce more cheaply than other parts of the US, but the situation could be different if Texas is outside the US and competing with cheap (and not cheap) foreign countries.
Texas actually has two shale fields, one west of Dallas, Barnett and one in south Texas, Eagle Ford which is the the most active in the country. Oil is only the icing on the economic cake in Texas. We have manufacturing, agriculture, shipping, aviation and a plethora of other dynamic sources of commerce. Companies are moving to Texas in droves. They can't get her fast enough.
Okay, but if you change one thing in a system you may alter the whole system drastically. If Houston is the 2nd busiest port in the US, what happens when it's no longer in the US? Will trade reroute to other cities?
There isn't the capacity in other cities. New Orleans is the deep water port for Mississippi River traffic. It offloads and transfers to shallow water conveyances. Corpus Christi, Houston, Beaumont, New Orleans, and Mobile have the refineries and are also the origination point for major pipelines. Regulation and unions have killed east and west coast ports where they no longer have suitable infra structure to handle the volume.
Banking is becoming decentralized (or recentralized). North Carolina and Georgia may give you a run for your money. Even places like Minneapolis or Washington DC have a shot. And foreign centers may dwarf all of them.
It is more than banking, it is trade, where transactions are taking place and the place to be to be involved in those transactions. Texas' tax codes are friendly where the US codes are burdensome. The US could change its codes, but they could do that now and clean up a whole bunch of crap. They won't do it because liberals don't believe in it.
But finance is mobile. What happens if Texas isn't part of the US? And for manufacturing -- Texas can produce more cheaply than other parts of the US, but the situation could be different if Texas is outside the US and competing with cheap (and not cheap) foreign countries.
Control of overall port capacity will prevent any significant change in trade patterns. Texas does not rely on income tax which gets embedded into the cost of goods and services. They use sales taxes and the equivalent which means foreign goods are subject to the same tax burden as domestic goods. They lose their built in advantage of about 15% which they currently have. Texas exports will not have embedded taxes, so they will ship at about 15% advantage to US goods and on pretty even footing with cheap labor countries and the cheap countries cannot compete with Texas on High Tech durable goods, especially in the oil and energy arenas.
The robust and efficient economy in Texas is not well known around the country because the media covers much of it up. Liberals do not want people seeing what really works.