This post was supposed to have the title: "NYT Magazine on Texas Republicans" [fixd - mgmt] 

posted by pablo at 11:35AM CST on December 08

I was thinking about this the other day -- Perry does deserve some cred for the fact that Texas is coming through the recession far better than almost all states.

If you click to select the top several economies by GDP (CA, TX, FL, NY, IL) in this chart of unemployment over time, you'll see that Texas has well outperformed the other top economic states, staying in the 6-8% range. It's also kept pace against baselines for its region.

Here's a chart of Gross State Product over Perry's duration for the top 8 economies; Texas does the best by far, and with much lower state spending. (yes, this invites the question of what more spending would do -- or spending reallocated from abstinence education -- but still.)

So he may be a social policy douchenozzle, as amply documented in the article -- but to whatever extent the governor acts as steward of the economy, he's done a decent job.

                    	public $   	gross st prod	population
All states combined 	$2,645.2 	$13,715.7	300.8
California          	$385.3   	$1,801.8 	36.8 
Texas               	$170.3   	$1,148.5 	23.5 
New York            	$247.9   	$1,105.0 	19.3 
Florida             	$147.3   	$741.9   	18.2 
Illinois            	$107.8   	$617.4   	12.8 
Pennsylvania        	$108.3   	$533.2   	12.5 
Ohio                	$99.8    	$462.5   	11.5 
New Jersey          	$86.4     	$461.3   	8.9

posted by mrflip at 04:25PM CST on December 08