Houston Strategies

WSJ says really nice things about Texas

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger had some very nice things to say about Texas in a recent column about Rick Perry.  For my excerpts, I'm going to skip the Perry stuff and just focus on the Texas accolades.  It'll make you proud.

Rick Perry says Texas is the most successful state in America. He's right. Texan economic output exceeds Mexico's and Australia's and rivals India's. ...

(that last stat blows me away considering that we have 25 million people vs. 1,200 million (1.2 billion) people in India!) 

Texas, unlike California, isn't America's most beautiful state. Through October this year, parts of Texas had 90 days of 100+ temperatures. Yet companies and people keep moving into the high heat of Texas. ... 

In 1990, one of the world's biggest companies, Exxon Mobil, left New York City for Dallas. Exxon's former CEO, Lee Raymond, says the move in part was indeed about costs and New York State's notoriously overbearing tax authority. But it was also about working amid a culture of competence. "It's just the attitude in Texas of getting things done and doing them well," he says. 

Mr. Raymond remarks that the economic policies that in time trapped the Northeast and Rust Belt in spirals of decline never touched Texas. But this is about something beyond low taxes and no unions: "In Texas the people tend to be farmers or individual businessmen, and they have this attitude: We have to make do with what we have and work together to get things done and survive. It's can-do. That attitude permeates everything there."
...
Ed Trevis, a smaller fish, is also happy. A California-educated Brazilian immigrant and tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for 25 years, Mr. Trevis moved Corvalent Corp. to Austin for similar reasons. He had to hire a firm just to do California's compliance. "In California," he says, "you are always doing something wrong." 

"What I found in Texas is that from the standpoint of running a business, cost of living, education, the labor pool, quality of life, it just blew other states out of the water." I heard this constantly—people enjoy being in business in Texas.
...
Texas' pro-business bias goes back about 175 years—and never died. "It's just that they believe in the whole Horatio Alger myth down here," said Mr. Booth. "It's hard to understand if you haven't lived here." 

And so Perry's Paradox: Rick Perry is a success because he nominally presides over an American tiger state, a genuine free-market economy that doesn't much need—or want—his tender loving care. ... 

This much is obvious: Texas, not California, better be the American future...

Well, at least economically.  Let's hope California's weather - and not Texas' - is America's future, most especially in this horribly hot-and-dry drought year...

Labels: economic strategy, economy, identity

posted by Tory Gattis @ 9:05 PM