Here's Harold Meyerson giving us more on Rick "Oops" Perry's hollow Texas "miracle:"
... Taxpayers in the other 49 states subsidized the so-called Texas miracle. Without everyone else’s help, the vast Texas throng of the working poor would have been so destitute that consumption levels would have dwindled. Texas’s use of federal dollars to keep its workers afloat is only deepened by its favor-the-rich-and-soak-the-poor tax policies. As a result of the state’s lack of an income tax and high sales taxes, the poorest 20 percent of Texans pay 12.5 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes — one of the highest levels in the United States — while the wealthiest 1 percent pay just 2.9 percent.[snip]
“Without Texas,” Perry boasted when he announced his candidacy, “America would have lost 400,000 jobs” between 2008 and 2014. But without America paying Texas’s freight, the miracle would have sunk in the muck. (our emphasis)As others have noted, with Texas benefiting from an oil boom during much of Perry's administration, it was easy to point to Texas as a somewhat recession-proof economy. Below the surface, however, was a low-wage, low-benefit, environmentally hazardous, regressive sales tax economy that would begin to sag and become even more dependent on Federal aid as soon as the oil boom turned to bust.
Frankly, it's a miracle Perry is getting away with touting his chops as a golden boy of regressive Republican economic policy, although if you're a 1-percenter, it's working just fine for you.
