And just like George W. Bush, the Texas bullshit he spews is almost as deep as his lack of knowledge about how to run this country.
However he has a few talking points which, on the surface, might convince the paint eaters, especially those that have been sniffing Sarah Palin's non-candidate panties so long they have suffered brain damage, to support his campaign.
The one he is most well known for is his "40 percent of the new jobs created in America, were created in Texas" horse-pucky. Think Progress examines that claim:
Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), since he launched his presidential campaign on Saturday, has paraded around the stat that “since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America.” “Now think about that. We’re home to less than 10 percent of the population in America, but 40 percent of all the new jobs were created in that state,” Perry says.
This stat leaves out a lot of the story. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has promoted the number, but “it acknowledges that the number comes out different depending on whether one compares Texas to all states or just to states that are adding jobs.” Between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than in Texas.
In fact, “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” The unemployment rate in Texas has been steadily increasing throughout the recession, and went from 7.7 to 8.2 percent while the state was supposedly creating 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S.
How is this possible, since Texas has created over 126,000 jobs since the depths of the recession in February 2009? The fact of the matter is that looking purely at job creation misses a key point, namely that Texas has also experienced incredibly rapid population and labor force growth (due to a series of factors, including that Texas weathered the housing bubble reasonably well due to strict mortgage lending regulations). When this is taken into account, Texas’ job creation looks decidedly less impressive:
Clearly, there is no miracle for Texas here. While over 126,000 net jobs were created in Texas over the last two and a half years, the labor force expanded by over 437,000, meaning that overall Texas has added unemployed workers at a rate much faster than it has created jobs. And although states like Michigan have lost jobs (29,200 since February 2009), the state’s labor force has shrunk by over 185,000 since then. As a result, while there are fewer jobs, there are significantly less workers looking for them.
So much for the "Texas Miracle."
And if that was not enough to convince anybody that Perry is simply lacquering his Texas economic turd to look like a gold nugget, take a look at what they put together over at the Big Picture:
In each case, I ranked the 50 states in a manner where “1″ is the best score achievable and “50″ the worst (e.g., the highest high school graduation rate would garner a “1,” the lowest incidence of STD’s would also garner a “1.” In other words, if you’re a governor — a state’s CEO, as it were — you always want to be #1 and, conversely, nowhere near #50.).That said, let’s have a look at how Governor Perry’s Texas ranks in a dirty dozen metrics (and keep in mind that Perry has held the governorship for 11 years):
Not quite so impressive when you really examine the facts now is it?
Look I don't want to discriminate against anyone who might want to make a run at the White House, but considering how much damage was caused by George W. Bush to this country, I think this should be the mantra of the American voters for the foreseeable future.
