21 Reasons Rick Perry's Texas Is a Complete Disaster [View All]

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

21 Reasons Rick Perry's Texas Is a Complete Disaster
Third World status – the real promise of a Rick Perry administration – shouldn't be a goal to which the United States aspires.

August 15, 2011 |


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. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/news/152037/21_reasons_rick_perry%27s_texas_is_a_complete_disaster/