I just returned from California, where much of the talk was over an ad campaign Texas is running trying to lure jobs from California. Although Gov. Jerry Brown characterized the meager $24,000 ad buy by a Texas group as, "a burp; it's barely a fart," it gained plenty of resonance as local papers wrote about it. And now the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is following up with a visit to the Golden State that will include a reception for businesses responding to the ad's invitation to "check out Texas." Many Californians responded to the Texas move with the now predictable disdain for the Lone Star State as not measuring up to California in many ways. Much of what they say is simply inaccurate and relies on outdated notions of Texas, which has replaced California as America's jobs powerhouse.
The Sac Bee, for instance, wrote an editorial deriding Texas and claiming that Perry, "can't create jobs, he can only steal them from other states." This is demonstrably untrue. City Journal has a piece in its new edition (soon to be available online) by demographer Wendell Cox which employs a job dynamics database (the National Establishment Time Series database) to parse Texas' job growth. The state creates far more new jobs that it gains through job migration, and through much of the recent economic downturn has been one of the few places creating new jobs. Moreover, Texas has been leading the country in the creation of professional jobs, something that is rarely recognized.
Contrast that with a study that Cox did of California for CJ entitled The Long Stall which demonstrated just how much trouble the Golden State is having not just recently, but throughout the last decade. The chart above comes from that study.
And of course if California has so many advantages over Texas, as the Bee editorial recounts, why is Texas one of the top locations for migration of both people and jobs out of California, as this Manhattan Institute study suggests?
Contrast that with a study that Cox did of California for CJ entitled The Long Stall which demonstrated just how much trouble the Golden State is having not just recently, but throughout the last decade. The chart above comes from that study.
And of course if California has so many advantages over Texas, as the Bee editorial recounts, why is Texas one of the top locations for migration of both people and jobs out of California, as this Manhattan Institute study suggests?
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