Paul Krugman wrote yesterday in the New York Times about "The Texas Unmiracle", New York Times, Aug. 15, 2011, at A19. It's worth reading, because the facts about Texas are not nearly so rosy as Perry would paint them. As Krugman notes, even with the oil and gas prosperity to put a surface gloss on the Texas economy, facts for little folk on the ground are not so nice--one in four lacks health insurance; more Texans that do work have work that pays only minimum wage compared to other states; and unemployment has lately soared to 8.2 percent. Perry's approach to government can't be applied at a national level to achieve any good results.
As a former Texan (I graduated from high school in Carthage, Texas, a small town just south of the sprawling city of Longview where my family still resides), I must say I feel particularly queasy thinking about Texas Governor Rick Perry's presidential aspirations. I believe George W Bush will be viewed historically as one of our worst presidents--he oversaw a pullback on regulation and oversight that ensured that bank speculation would move us into the Great Recession, and he capped that with a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street--Paulson--who engineered a huge (and ultimately necessary because of the Bush deregulatory policies) bailout of the Big Banks (and indirectly of their Big Investors) but one with no strings attached! He led us into two senseless, interminable, and terribly costly --in both lives and dollars--wars of choice, for reasons primarily to do with furthering the military-industrial complex and creating politically useful 'enemies' to replace the anti-communism politics that came in so handy to Reagan and Johnson in their presidencies.
Rick Perry would be even worse.
Partly it's that Texas breeds a very special category of politician--one that is tied much too closely to Big Oil and one that considers business to be nothing less than the central component of the State. What's good (short-term) for business is what Texan politicians try to provide.
Partly it's because Texas is a very class-conscious state. There are two classes: the upper crust (inherited money, oil men, bankers, lawyers, and doctors and other professionals) and everybody else. For anyone who isn't in the upper class, it is not a very happy state. The upper class has money and builds megamansions in gated subdivisions. They use enormous amounts of water (in a drought stricken state that is not about to regulate how many times they can fill their pools) and keep enormous lawns mowed pristinely like golf courses. The rest live in poorly paved areas with hardly any services in cheap but shoddily constructed homes that are hot in summer (requiring excessive energy to run the ubiquitous air conditioning) and cold and drafty in winter (requiring excessive energy to heat).
There has been rapid population growth in Texas, due in part to legal and illegal immigration and in part to migration from other states. The one-note economy has done okay because Texas has oil and gas. But while 'the economy' is ok (and the investor class is having a ball), ordinary folks aren't. Wages at most of those new jobs that Perry brags about Texas forming are at the bottom of the pay scale and maybe not enough in most cases for a family to live on. Discrimination--anti-Mexican, anti-black, anti-women--is rampant: Texas men still like to brag about "keeping the wife in her place", as befits a state where men drive pickup trucks and women seem to feel that they need to wear high heels to teach Montessori pre-school and elaborate makeup to make a run to the 7/11.
Taxes are low or nonexistent. There's no Texas income tax, so most of the revenues come from regressive taxes that hit the poor and middle class the hardest, like sales taxes. Low taxes means low or nonexistent services, and reasonable regulation is unheard of. The result is that every business operates like a lone wolf out to get what it can from its 'customers' without doing any more than it absolutely has to (and the state doesn't require it to do much of anything). In my sister's town of Longview, there is hardly any 'town' at all--it is all one mall after another, all reachable only by car and surrounded by hot asphalt jungles in the 100+ degree summer heat. Sprawl is everywhere, as one developer after another bulldozes down the native pine forests, levels off the creeks and hollows and builds yet another sprawling shopping mall with parking lots galore, no trees, and no 'green' business ideas. Businesses from lawn services to plumbers and electricians work with minimal state oversight: they seem to rip their customers off as frequently (or more) than they do the right thing, at least judging from tales heard while waiting in airports or in line in restaurants, etc.
Don't get me started on my experience with hospitals and nursing homes in Texas. Hospitals seem to pay more attention to profits than to serving their patients--they pay their doctors well but seem to cut staff on a monthly basis, leaving their patients with inferior services--dirty rooms (my mother's hospital room had a curtain with fresh-looking blood stains on it); lax attention to patients (an alarm on one of my mother's machines sounded for 10 minutes before a nurse finally responded; the 'regular' doctor didn't visit my mother over the entire time I was there in the hospital or in the nursing home); and cavalier attitudes (coming in to turn a patient without even saying hello, I'm here to turn you, etc.). And in the nursing homes,doctors are paid to 'oversee' the medical staff but never set foot on the property; 'nurse practitioners' change prescriptions at will (one speculates that they receive a special fee from Medicare when they 'have to' change medical prescriptions); admissions officers don't understand their own forms; administrators misstate the law; business officers have forms that are self-contradictory (and otherwise tell people they 'have to' sign forms that are not applicable to the particular patient--in my sister's case, I forced the home to withdraw three forms that they had 'required' her to sign, but which were either inapplicable on their face to my mother or inappropriate under the law for my sister to sign); nurses on duty sleep (deeply) on the job (I am an eye-witness to this); poorly trained"certified nursing assistants" do most of the work on minimum wage jobs and have little possibility of advancement.
I find particularly worrisome Perry's sense of politics as a religious mission and the inevitable tendency that entails of his imposing his religious preferences on policy choices. His recent prayer-day initiative in Texas shows that he has no respect for the separation of church and state and little respect for religions other than fundamentalist Christianity. One can just picture the way tax dollars would be used in a Perry presidency to support new 'faith-based initiatives' that would use the federal government's power and contracts to push fundamentalist Christian faith in prisons, military and other venues.
Perry's prescription for his purported "success" in Texas is really just another version of the old mantra from Reagonomics--privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts--with an even stronger emphasis on christianization of government, cutting the size of government (no matter the benefit of the cut programs to the majority of Americans), and stratification of class structures. It's a prescription for long-term disaster in Texas--when the oil and gas fields give out, Texas will be a wasteland. And it's a prescription for imminent disaster nationally, where there is no one-note economy and where the fate of investors tells us very little about the sustainable economy for most people.
Take Perry's understanding (or rather lack thereof) of the US budget, debt, and tax situation. The US is a sovereign nation able to print its own money or raise taxes back to a level that is not at tax-haven status as we currently are. (The US is in the bottom couple of the OECD developed nations in terms of tax burden, so obviously the US has more than competitive tax rates.) The US is in quite a different situation than Greece, Ireland, Spain or Italy, where the Euro nations are tied together yet not quite a true federation with a single constitution. The typical 'free market' answer to high sovereign debt in Europe is another prescription for disaster--impose austerity measures that squelch the economy, leave the underclass even worse off, and then require excessive expenditures on policing in order to maintain 'law and order'. In this country, the extreme right House GOP used economic terrorism to extort a ridiculous 'debt deal' and attempt to impose similar austerity--cutting back good government programs with the argument that the US spends too much. You can't talk about spending too much without a comprehensive review of what we spend on, why we spend it, and what resources we have to pay for that spending. The extreme right in this country which Perry is a part of just wants to cut spending without any of that consideration of means and ends. And to that end, nutcases like Perry want to convince Americans that the actual means available for us to deal with debt and ensure against default (reasonable raising of the debt ceiling, as done by Reagan multiple times; quantitative easing, as done by the Fed already several times in this crisis) aren't really ok.
[The Debt Deal is idiocy on which I will hopefully write soon. Suffice it to say that the debt ceiling is an artificial hangover from decades ago that should be eliminated and that the GOP focus on the debt ceiling as a way to 'force' cuts to the economy has misled the American people about the nature of the US deficit and the degree to which the deficit is a concern. The US does not spend too much; the US can print money and or raise taes to pay debt if it needs to, and the US has no reason to ever default on its debt. As to S&P's downgrade? well, that is equally nonsensical--it is judging the US as it would a corporation. Well, I should say "as it should a corporation"--since S&P seldom performs adequate analysis when it gives debt ratings, as witness its ridiculously rosy ratings of CDOs and REMICs and other mortgage securities leading up to the Great Recession. But the US is not a corporation; it is a sovereign nation. It has the power--if it should choose to use it--to force the 'too big to fail' institutions to downsize, to engage in 'quantitative easing', etc.]
Perry can't convince Americans with facts or logic--the means ARE available to deal with needed debt reduction and deficit trimming without undercutting the social programs that have served the country so well. So he does it like a school-yard bully--with name-calling and factual misstatements that he knows most people won't have the knowledge or wherewithal to check out. Witness his ridiculous campaign trail claim, intended to incite Tea Party ire and typical voter dislike of the Fed, that further quantitative easing by the Fed would be "treason". Dan Balz, Perry Warns of Fed Treason, Challenges Obama, Washington Post, August 16, 2011. (Perry's attacks on Obama's economy are ridiculous as well--there's no doubt that without the deficit spending of the economic stimulus, the Great Recession would have been much worse. Of course, without the tax cut portions of the stimulus that the GOP pushed for, the stimulus would have likely been much more successful.)
As Krugman notes, every state can't make it by luring jobs away from other states. We need to stop talking in wrong-headed Reaganomics spin points and start making sense. That means government investment in job-creating public infrastructure and in human capital development (and future job expansion) by increasing federal funding for public education. And that in turn means getting rid of our 'tax haven' tax rate structure by letting the Bush tax cuts expire--all of them--while increasing the progressivity of the higher tax rates and the estate tax, getting rid of the corporate tax loopholes, and finally ending the embarassment of the fund manager carried interest giveaway.
Hey folks, even my older sister--a fundamentalist Christian and staunch Republican all of her life --can't stand Rick Perry.....
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