Pricking The Perry Bubble
by digby
The beltway press is all aquiver to start pounding the story line that Rick Perry is a job creating hunkorama. The fact that his state is about to fiscally implode will have no effect and neither will the fact that he is an even doofier George W. Bush with better hair.(Let’s not forget that he served under Junior for six years as Lieutenant Governor.) What they are looking for is “proof” that hardcore GOP economic dogma works so they can pretend that we have a serious ideological duel and Perry’s phony hagiography will provide it.
However, it isn’t true. Think Progress points out:
As the Austin American-Statesman noted, “while the national unemployment rate is 9.1 percent and the Texas unemployment rate is 8 percent, some 23 states, including New York, have lower unemployment rates.” …Between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than they did in Texas, and “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” But as it turns out, Texas is leading the nation in one employment metric — the number and percentage of minimum wage jobs:
Additionally, Texas has by far the largest number of employees working at or below the federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour in 2010) compared to any state, according to a BLS report. In 2010, about 550,000 Texans were working at or below minimum wage, or about 9.5 percent of all workers paid by the hour in the state. Texas tied with Mississippi for the greatest percentage of minimum wage workers…From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers in Texas rose from 221,000 to 550,000, an increase of nearly 150 percent.
If they could get rid of that pesky minimum wage I’d bet they could create even more of those fabulous low wage jobs.
Texas is basically a banana republic racing to destroy its middle class entirely. And that is the true GOP vision for America, no doubt about it.The question is whether or not the political media is going to go all goo-goo eyed over the haircut and the accent and forget to tell the people the truth.
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