The Walmart of states
by Tom Sullivan
A Montana man committed suicide last weekend after murdering his family. His wife was “mocking” him, he told a friend. Police described the survivalist as “a Constitutionalist who didn’t believe in government.” They’re like oxymorons who don’t believe in contradiction that way.
Speaking of not believing in government, Rick Perry, the returning presidential contestant and former Texas governor, boasts how the job-creating, Texas economic “miracle” is a model for how to run the country. (It was the same with another former Texas governor-president. What happened with that?)
The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson finds the Texas miracle less than miraculous. By two measures of job quality, “Texas rates dead last.” Texans have the highest percentage
of people without health insurance in the country. What’s more, Meyerson writes:
The second measure of job quality is the share of people qualifying for government poverty programs who are nonetheless employed. In April, the University of California Center for Labor Research and Education released a study quantifying the number of Americans receiving Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, children’s health insurance coverage or the earned-income tax credit who have an employed family member. Low-paid work has become so prevalent, the study showed, that the yearly tab of federal dollars going to working families was $128 billion. The state with the highest share of funds going to such families was Texas.
By this measure, Texas is the Walmart of states — something else Texans who don’t believe in government can be proud of. After all, Walmart is a BIG box store.
The 49 other states are subsidizing Perry’s “so-called Texas miracle,” Meyerson writes. “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.”
Should he succeed in taking his model national, Rick Perry’s Texas-sized plan for America, I guess, is to recruit enough “downline” countries to do for America what America is already doing for Texas.
I wonder, does Perry also sell Amway?