Posted on 10/31/2013 12:03:58 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Critics charge that Texas’s growth depends on the oil and gas industries and is weighted toward low-wage jobs. But in fact, Texas’s low-tax, light-regulation policies have produced a highly diversified economy that from 2002 to 2011 created nearly one-third of the nation’s highest-paying jobs. In those years, its number of upper- and middle-income jobs grew 24 percent.
Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes -- Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland -- to states with lower income levels.
“Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?” he asks.
Actually, it's not puzzling at all. The movement from high-tax, high-housing-cost states to low-tax, low-housing-cost states has been going on for more than 40 years, as I note in my new book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics.
Between 1970 and 2010 the population of New York state increased from 18 million to 19 million. In that same period, the population of Texas increased from 11 million to 25 million.
The picture is even starker if you look at major metro areas. The New York metropolitan area, including counties in New Jersey and Connecticut, increased from 17.8 million in 1970 to 19.2 million in 2010 — up 8 percent. During that time the nation grew 52 percent.
In the same period, the four big metro areas in Texas — Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin — grew from 6 million to 15.6 million, a 160 percent increase.
Contrary to Noah’s inference, people don’t move away from opportunity. They move partly in response to economic incentives, but also to pursue dreams and escape nightmares.
Opportunity does exist in the Northeastern states and in California — for people with very high skill levels. And for low-skill immigrants, without whom those metro areas would have lost rather than gained population over the last three decades.
But there’s not much opportunity there for people with midlevel skills who want to raise families. Housing costs are exceedingly high, partly, as Noah notes, because of restrictive land use and zoning regulations.
And central city public schools, with a few exceptions, repel most middle-class parents.
High taxes produce revenues to finance handsome benefits and pensions for public employee union members in the high-cost states. It’s hard to see how this benefits middle-class people making their livings in the private sector.
Moreover, Noah’s use of per capita incomes is misleading, since children typically have no income and many in the Northeast and coastal California are childless. If you look at household incomes, these states are far closer to the national average.
As economist Tyler Cowen points out in a Time magazine cover story, when you adjust incomes for tax rates and cost of living, Texas comes out ahead of California and New York and ranks behind only Virginia and Washington state (which like Texas has no state income tax).
Critics charge that Texas’s growth depends on the oil and gas industries and is weighted toward low-wage jobs. But in fact, Texas’s low-tax, light-regulation policies have produced a highly diversified economy that from 2002 to 2011 created nearly one-third of the nation’s highest-paying jobs. In those years, its number of upper- and middle-income jobs grew 24 percent.
Liberals like Noah often decry income inequality. But the states with the most unequal incomes and highest poverty levels these days are California and New York. That’s what happens when high taxes and housing costs squeeze out the middle class.
As Noah notes, “Few working-class people earn enough money to live anywhere near San Francisco.”
This leaves a highly visible and articulate upper class willing, in line with their liberal beliefs, to shoulder high tax burdens and a very much larger lower class, many of them immigrants, available to serve them in restaurants, landscape their gardens and valet-park their cars.
There’s nothing wrong with living in a high-rise, restaurant-studded, subway-served neighborhood (I do). It’s great that America offers more such options than one and two generations ago.
But it’s foolish to try to cram everyone into such surroundings, as the Obama Department of Housing and Urban Development (as Terry Eastland reports in the Weekly Standard) and California Governor Jerry Brown are trying to do.
Noah notes correctly that fewer Americans have been moving recently. That’s always true in times of economic distress (the Okies’ trek along U.S. Route 66 to California’s Central Valley in the 1930s was a memorable exception, not the rule).
But they continue to move to the low-tax states that are providing jobs and living space where they can pursue their dreams and escape places that burden them with high costs and provide few middle-class amenities in return.
My prediction is the Feds will mandate equal Medicaid eligibility levels in all states somehow. Maybe through the courts.
I believe that Medicaid is one of the single largest line items in the highly taxed states budgets.
When that happens, and I believe it will, there will be much less of a differential.
Welfare is the government funded breeding program for demrat voters. Whites are simply being bred out of existence along with their following of abortion killers.
Oklahoma is the reddest state on the continent. I have never met an Oklahoman that wasn’t a fine person. They are not to be trifled with.
While they continue to breed a next generation Americans (working, Americans, that is), often can't afford to breed themselves because they are working to pay off the tab for the illegals.
Responsible people are being outbred because they are picking up the tab for the irresponsible ones. Get rid of Welfare as we know it, and that problem might reverse itself. Otherwise, LBJ was right.
Yes, we love it here but don’t tell anyone.
“Texas should have never moved all those Katrina people there from New Orleans. They brought massive crime, a rise in welfare and a rise in Democrat votes as well.”
Yeaaah, guess no good deed goes unpunished. Hopefully, over time they will return to their beloved Big Easy. Surely welfare benefits are better there than in Texas. If not, then we need to tighten ours up some.
Responsible people are being outbred because they are picking up the tab for the irresponsible ones.
Only in some cases. In the homeschool circles I travel in, families average at least 6 children and they are raising them to be responsible, productive adults. The problem is the parents who are conservative but send their children off to the government reeducation camps to be re programed.
Actually, the problem is the Welfare system, and the refusal of the Federal Government to secure our borders.
The reason I left Houston in 2005, Katrina evacuees!
Moreover, Noah’s use of per capita incomes is misleading, since children typically have no income and many in the Northeast and coastal California are childless. If you look at household incomes, these states are far closer to the national average.
That’s how we ended up with Graham here in SC. All the liberals up north flocked to SC to escape the liberal taxes they voted for and now they vote for people who share their liberalism.
You have a most excellent and truthful tagline.
I know, it is like all New Orleans had were people on the dole, criminals and victims.
Why did Texas ever keep them, it would almost have been better to take and enclave of illegals. At least there would have been less crime brought in IMO.
He can hate more than one group.
“Welfare is the government funded breeding program for demrat voters. Whites are simply being bred out of existence along with their following of abortion killers.”
True, and whites are subsidizing the rest while it happens. The Dems now prefer to import Hispanic voting-age wlefare recipients instead of breeding urban blacks (who cost too much and behave erratically).
“Responsible people are being outbred because they are picking up the tab for the irresponsible ones. Get rid of Welfare as we know it, and that problem might reverse itself. Otherwise, LBJ was right.”
Resonsible people would pick up much less of the tab if they would breed themselves. LBJ was absolutely right in how he intended to buy the votes for decades into the future; that doesn’t mean working people should just forego families of their own.
(I know there are many sound legal issues with marriage that aren’t going away, but to simply watch one’s people go the way of the dodo is insanity)
“You have a most excellent and truthful tagline.”
Thank you. Until the outright racism in affirmative action is addressed, nothing else (outside of abortion) matters much to me. Without equal access to education and jobs, I don’t think tax issues or even family issues mean much to white guys.
I also don’t think white guys should be expected to treat blacks, Hispanics, and women as equals when the government regards those groups as mildly retarded. White women alone could swing the balance of power in this country, but they’d rather vote their feminism (and preferential status) and watch their eggs dry up (cursing the little brown children they brsuh past as they head to work every day to feed said brown children while they have none of their own).
If you are trying to live within your means, you can't live as well as those who are living outside your means, on your dime. The productive are being bled white by the government to pay for the non-productive, and responsible people aren't going to have more kids than they can afford.
That leaves the rest breeding like rats, and that will overrun the responsible folks in the end IF the Welfare system isn't seriously cut back or modified to remove the incentive to have kids wholesale.
“Working people don’t get a monthly bonus for having more kids like the welfare moms do.”
They get the same tax deductions that others get.
“That leaves the rest breeding like rats, and that will overrun the responsible folks in the end IF the Welfare system isn’t seriously cut back or modified to remove the incentive to have kids wholesale.”
The birthrate fell for the welfare populations after the 1996 welfare reform (this is how Hispanics passed blacks in population by 2000, ten years earlier than anticipated); the underclass is growing because they are being imported now. The new underclass (Hispanics) is breeding the way the urban underclass had done previously (while being supplemented with a steady stream of imported reinforcements); that demographic is what is costing the Republicans big-time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.