The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Wrongologist
blog reader Shelley suggested a column about the “Texas Miracle” on the day
that the NYT had this
story about Texas water rights. Apparently, Texas allows corporations to
pretty much take water away from people who own it: (brackets and emphasis by
the Wrongologist)

And
the commission agreed, exempting 66 towns and electric utilities for health and
safety reasons, even
though hundreds of farmers and others who lost their water held more senior
rights. So a big
corporation got the water. The Texas miracle often favors big business over the
little guy.

Last fall,
economist Tyler Cowen tried to make the case that “Texas is our Future” in Time
Magazine. Cowen observed that more Americans are migrating to Texas than
to any other state. He said:

The idea that vast numbers of
Americans are “voting with their feet” for liberty and prosperity by abandoning
blue states and moving to Texas has become a conservative gospel, but the answer to the question of whether Texas is America’s
future depends on your political orientation as much as the facts on the
ground.

Phillip Longman in the Washington
Monthly deconstructed some of the migration data. He indicates that according to Census Bureau data,
441,682 native-born Americans moved to Texas from other states between 2010 and
2011. Sounds like a lot. But 358,048 Texans left their state behind during the
same period.

The net domestic migration of
native-born Americans to Texas came to just 83,634. It’s the demographic
equivalent of Germantown, Maryland (population 86,395) “voting with its feet”
and moving to Texas.

What
about job growth? Time reported on the
Texas boosterism of Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve
Bank of Dallas:

To be
sure, Texas has more minimum-wage jobs than any other state, and only
Mississippi exceeds it with the most minimum-wage workers per capita.

According
to the Dallas Fed, only 28% percent of the jobs created in or relocated to
Texas since 2001 pay in the lowest quarter of the nation’s wage distribution.
By comparison, jobs paying in the top half account for about 45% percent of the
new jobs in Texas. The most obvious question about Texas
job growth is how much is driven by the
boom in Texas oil and gas production? Texas boosters say the Texas
economy is more diversified than in the 1970s. Yet, oil and gas account for a
rapidly rising share of the Texas economy.

Thanks to
fracking and historically high world oil prices, Texas oil production increased
by 126% between 2010 and 2013. Only a few years ago, Texas’s oil production had
dwindled to just 15% of US output; by May of last year it had jumped to 34.5%. Texas
accounts for 27% of US natural gas production, which is more than the
production of any nation except Russia. That creates jobs outside the oil
patch. A recent issue of Texas
Monthly reported that, in sleepy towns like Cotulla, the population
has more than tripled in the past two years, and no fewer than thirteen new
hotels have opened to accommodate the influx of oil rig workers.

Finally,
between 1998 and 2011, the percent of Texas GDP from oil and gas extraction
more than doubled, according to the US Dept. of Commerce. Meanwhile, despite
the hype about high tech jobs, the share of the Texas economy produced by the
information, communications, and technology sectors is 27% smaller than it was in 1998.

Texas has
a growing population, but inward migration has been quite modest. Texas
population has boomed due to two main factors: immigration from abroad, mostly
Mexico, and a birthrate that is the second highest in the nation after Utah.

From
Longman:

But
regardless of its source, population growth fuels economic growth. It swells
the supply and lowers the cost of labor, while at the same time adding to the
demand for new products and services. The population of Texas swelled by more
than 24% from 2000 to 2013, as did the demand for just about everything, from
houses to highways to strip malls. And this, combined with new flows of oil and
gas dollars, plus increased trade with Mexico, favored Texas with strong job
creation numbers.

Within
Texas, their (few) liberal legislators have updated a publication every year
since 2003 entitled “Texas
On the Brink” which provides rankings that point out the state’s deficiencies,
such as being last in the percentage of the adult population who graduated from
high school while being first among the states in carbon dioxide emissions and
in the share of the population lacking health insurance. Here are a few lowlights:

Education:

• Elementary and Secondary Public School
  Enrollment: 2nd (they have the 2nd largest population)

• Percentage of Population Graduated from High School: 50th

Health Care:

• Percent
  of Population Uninsured: 1st (highest # of uninsured)

• Percent
  of Non-Elderly Uninsured: 1st (highest # of uninsured)

• Percent
  of Low Income Population Covered by Medicaid: 48th

Environment:

• Amount
  of Carbon Dioxide Emissions: 1st (highest)

• Amount
  of Hazardous Waste Generated: 1st (highest)

Democracy:

• Percent of Voting-Age Population Registered to Vote: 47th

• Percent of
  Voting-Age Population that Votes: 51st

Migrate to
Texas! Just don’t be old, sick, poor, a woman, non-Christian, union, non-white,
a child, want to vote, or need an abortion.

The real
Texas miracle is that its current leaders get away with bragging so much about it.