21 Reasons Rick Perry’s Texas Is a Complete Disaster

August 15, 2011 | AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

Rick Perry’s road to the White House will be paved with spin and blatant lies of omission. He’s basing his entire campaign on a single data-point: Texas, with 10 percent of the country’s population, has produced 37 percent of net new jobs in the U.S. since the recovery.

That kernel of truth, as I noted recently, is mostly a result of a massive increase in the state’s population – much of it due to Hispanic immigration. Texas’ unemployment rate has actually risen even as those jobs were being created. Texas also leads the nation in creating crappy minimum wage jobs without benefits – the number of minimum wage workers increased by 150 percent between 2007 and 2010.

He also lucked into a boom in energy prices in his oil and gas-rich state – another factor having nothing to do with his governance.

Under Perry, endless tax breaks for politically connected Texas corporations helped create a massive budget deficit that Perry first addressed with federal stimulus funds – money from a program he decried as a “misguided” desire “to spend our children’s inheritance” — and then by cutting spending on education and the state’s already threadbare social services to the bone. With the exception of a few economic basket-cases like Mississippi, Texas is way ahead of the pack in the race to the bottom.

Rick Perry’s line on this is obviously quite different. In announcing his candidacy last weekend, the governor bragged that “we have led Texas based on some just really pretty simple guiding principles. One is don’t spend all of the money. Two is keeping the taxes low and under control. Three is you have your regulatory climate fair and predictable. Four is reform the legal system so frivolous lawsuits don’t paralyze employers that are trying to create jobs. Over the years, we have followed this recipe to produce the strongest economy in the nation.”

This talking-point is being echoed across the conservative message machine. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that “the core impulse of Obamanomics is to make America less like Texas and more like California, with more government, more unions, more central planning, higher taxes.” In May, Newt Gingrich told Fox News host Sean Hannity, “I know how to get the whole country to resemble Texas.”

It’s a terrifying thought. Looking at the number of jobs a state has added in isolation is deeply misleading; we don’t only face a jobs crisis in this nation, we face a crisis of rising economic insecurity. The American middle class is embattled, and keeping up with population growth by adding jobs serving up fast-food and greeting Walmart shoppers doesn’t help ameliorate the kind of economic pain millions of Americans are suffering.

So, to add some perspective, let’s take a broader look at how Texans are faring under Rick Perry’s watch. (Several of the following items were compiled by Peter Montgomery at Right-Wing Watch.)

1. Texas leads the nation in the percentage of its population without health insurance (2010).

2. Only one state covered a smaller share of its poor population with Medicaid (PDF).

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21 Reasons Rick Perry’s Texas Is a Complete Disaster | News & Politics | AlterNet