Texas Makes California Its Cowgirl

The Economist has an article boosting Texas over the bankruptcy-teetering disasters of New York and California.

Texas now hosts more Fortune 500 companies than any other American state. They include AT&T, Dell and Texas Instruments; oil giants such as Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Valero; American, Continental and Southwest Airlines; Fluor, a huge construction firm (recently lured from California); J.C. Penney; Halliburton; and 52 others. Texas claims to have been responsible for 70% of all the net new jobs created last year in America’s 50 states, though since only a few states created any jobs at all that is not quite as astonishing as it sounds.


True, the film tactfully ignores the recession. Texas followed America into the downturn in September last year, almost a year after the rest. In May it shed a worrying 24,700 jobs, and the Dallas Federal Reserve now forecasts that between 315,000 and 350,000 jobs will go in 2009. But proportionately the May figure was still lower than for the nation as a whole, and Texas’s unemployment rate, at 7.1%, was 2.3 points below the American average. Housing repossessions are still very rare; the state budget is still in surplus even as California and New York teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Unlike those fellow states with large populations, Texas levies no personal income tax, and with almost unlimited space on which to build, its houses are big and affordable.

All this has brought people flooding in and made Texas America’s fastest-growing state. Net domestic inflows have been running at around 150,000 people in recent years, whereas California and New York have seen net outflows. Next year’s national census is expected to show that flourishing Houston has replaced struggling Chicago as America’s third city. Of the ten largest cities in America, three are in Texas.

Not only does Texas create more jobs, it has the highest relative standing in the area of urban prosperity:

Joel Kotkin, an urbanologist based in California, recently compiled a list for Forbes magazine of the best cities for job creation over the past decade. Among those with more than 450,000 jobs, the top five spots went to the five main Texaplex cities—and the winner of the small-cities category was Odessa, Texas. A study by the Brookings Institution in June came up with very similar results. Mr Kotkin particularly admires Houston, which he calls a perfect example of an “opportunity city”—a place with lots of jobs, lots of cheap housing and a welcoming attitude to newcomers.

He is certainly right about the last point: not too many other cities could have absorbed 100,000 refugees, bigheartedly and fairly painlessly, as Houston did after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. With vibrant Asian communities alongside its balanced Hispanic, white and black mix, with no discernible racial tensions, and with more foreign consulates than any American city except New York and Los Angeles, Houston is arguably America’s most enthusiastically cosmopolitan city, a place where the future has already arrived.

The article goes on to dampen the enthusiasm just a bit, but it is comforting to see one state respond to the worst recession since Jimmy Carter [double-digit inflation, interest rates, et cetera----the mantra of "worst since the Great Depression" is simply an outright fabrication.