Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Is the Texas economy #1 or #21?

It depends on whether you are measuring the overall state of the economy - including unemployment, state GDP, and state personal income per capita - or corporate profits. The later is doing much better than the former.

For more click here: Texas economy ranked 21st in nation - State also ranks near the bottom on education spending, correlation?

The Texas economy ranks 21st in the nation, according to Governing magazine, which used economic data from 2014 to 2016 to create an index.
That's a pretty middling performance for an economy once labelled the Texas Miracle because of how quickly it added jobs following the Great Recession of 2008. It turns out that all of that growth was tied to the oil and gas industry, which has taken a nosedive over the last two years.
The top five economies, according to the magazine, were Massachusetts, Oregon, Delaware, Colorado and California. Those are all blue states, which will surely infuriate Texas conservatives who will still angrily point out that Chief Executive magazine still ranks Texas, and four red states, as the best places to do business.
The radically different perspectives are not mutually exclusive, by the way, since one ranks economic performance as it impacts the population, and the other ranks the places where corporate profits grow the fastest.