It is a lovely thing when two political avatars slug it out in public. The little radio advertisement has so far become a weeklong conversation about the relative virtues of the nation’s two biggest states.
In other words, Perry got just what he wanted. The first part of persuading someone to move is getting them to consider that idea.
Behind the ads and the commentary is a serious competition between the states for economic pre-eminence. In that corner, Athens. In this one, Sparta. Each serves as the other’s foil, the Ali to its Frazier, the Moriarty to its Holmes, the red to its blue. Each sees itself as the economic, cultural and political engine of the future.
Over the past decade, Texas has been knocking the feathers out of the competition, adding jobs faster than any other state. That’s one of Perry’s brags and would have been a centerpiece of his 2012 presidential campaign, had he kept that effort alive long enough to need a centerpiece.
Not from Texas? Here’s one argument heard lately in California: Perry and Texas didn’t create all those jobs. They stole them. When Countrywide Financial (may it rest in peace) moved from California to Texas in 2004, Texas threw $20 million at the company, which in turn promised 7,500 jobs. Even the rosiest spin on that deal failed to add to the number of jobs in the universe. It just relocated them.
I like the Texas as Sparta and California as Athens reference. Sparta was famously austere - though it was very much a socialist system, so I'm not sure how far to take the analogy. And austerity seems to be reserved for the poor. The powerful in Sparta lived simple lives - I don't think you can say that about those in Texas. But Athens did throw a great deal of resources at public works, and California prides itself on doing the same.
More seriously, each state has a different orientation towards economic development, and this should be explored more fully. Over the past few decades, Texas has actively courted major corporations and encouraged them to move here by offering them a business friendly environment, which means that labor is kept cheap and regulations are kept low. Workers find it difficult to assemble into unions in order to drive up wages and enhance workplace safety. The ability of workers and consumers to use the courts to address problems has also been made more difficult in a number of ways: limits on awards and losers pays rules among others. Texas also keeps public sector costs low, most recently by cutting education and health expenditures. It's a top-down model for development, at least that seems the case to me.
California seems to have taken the opposite approach to economic development. It developed a first class education system - including some of the nation's top universities - and used them as centers of research. The products of this research was then spun into the technology that lead to a variety of business enterprises that we are all familiar with: Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Google among many others. This seems to me to be a bottom-up approach to economic development. Make sure people have the technological skills to develop ideas, and train a workforce necessary to sustain and grow that idea.
This is a start, but I think a more thorough look at the differences between the two states - in this and many other areas - is worth pursuing.
And a concluding question: The key criticism the story has about Texas' approach to economic development is that we don;t create jobs as much as we poach them from elsewhere. I wonder about the data backing this assertion up. Of the top corporations in Texas, how many started in Texas and how many relocated here?
More seriously, each state has a different orientation towards economic development, and this should be explored more fully. Over the past few decades, Texas has actively courted major corporations and encouraged them to move here by offering them a business friendly environment, which means that labor is kept cheap and regulations are kept low. Workers find it difficult to assemble into unions in order to drive up wages and enhance workplace safety. The ability of workers and consumers to use the courts to address problems has also been made more difficult in a number of ways: limits on awards and losers pays rules among others. Texas also keeps public sector costs low, most recently by cutting education and health expenditures. It's a top-down model for development, at least that seems the case to me.
California seems to have taken the opposite approach to economic development. It developed a first class education system - including some of the nation's top universities - and used them as centers of research. The products of this research was then spun into the technology that lead to a variety of business enterprises that we are all familiar with: Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Google among many others. This seems to me to be a bottom-up approach to economic development. Make sure people have the technological skills to develop ideas, and train a workforce necessary to sustain and grow that idea.
This is a start, but I think a more thorough look at the differences between the two states - in this and many other areas - is worth pursuing.
And a concluding question: The key criticism the story has about Texas' approach to economic development is that we don;t create jobs as much as we poach them from elsewhere. I wonder about the data backing this assertion up. Of the top corporations in Texas, how many started in Texas and how many relocated here?
