Texas Brags, California Lags

I posted about this on Facebook last night with this comment: Those who want to turn Texas blue should be upfront about what they really want — to destroy what makes Texas work.

California’s economy shrank an additional 2.6 percent [cumulatively from 2009-2011] before it grew 3.5 percent [in 2012].

So, in the past five years California’s real GDP contracted 0.3 percent, one of ten states where economic activity was less in 2012 than it was in 2008.

By contrast, the BEA revised Texas’ growth upward by 0.5 percent from 2009 to 2011.

Texas’ newly revised real GDP growth from 2009 to 2012 was 13 percent.

From 2009 to 2012, California’s share of the U.S. economy shrank from 13.1 percent to 12.9 percent while Texas’ portion of the American economy increased from 8.2 percent to 9 percent.

The most telling indictment of California’s performance? If you removed oil and gas from the Texas economy, the Lone Star state has still outpaced growth in California. Apologists for the Golden State shouldn’t forget that it is in possession of two-thirds of America’s proven shale reserves, a treasure trove that rivals many resource-rich sovereign countries.

The BEA also found, to the shock of all concerned, that while California was experiencing the largest tax hike in US history, the national economy grew at eight times the pace of California’s. The Texas economy, by contrast, grew 71 percent faster than the national economy that year.

Texas and California provide real-world results from the so-called laboratory of democracy — the states. The results aren’t even close. Texas wins and has been winning for years. California, champion of the big government blue state model, is in a death spiral. Texas, champion of the small government red state model, continues to grow and lead the way.

But the blue-staters want to wreck what we’ve got going here. They want to impose their failed belief systems on us. We just want to be left alone, to be perfectly honest. But the blue staters aren’t leaving that option open to us. They just keep messing with Texas. Obama’s Battleground Texas is all about wrecking the Texas record to impose disreputable blue state beliefs on us.

The latest little example of that was Wendy Davis’ stunt in the legislature. She imported old school thug politics to Austin to stop a bill that the majority of the state’s people support. She succeeded temporarily, but that victory cannot be allowed to stand or the rule of law is history. As those folks should be aware, the rule of law protects all of us from each other. That’s the point of the rule of law — to keep us from resorting to more direct means of obtaining the government that we want. It’s a very unwise thing for anyone to tear the rule of law asunder. Very unwise.