Job creation also bigger in Texas

Aaron Worthing at Patterico reports that half of all jobs created in the USA last year were created in Texas.

Of course, they make sure to have a strong regulatory environment, supported unions, made sure the state had a good income from increased taxes, and generally made things hostile for businesses. Oh wait, that’s California.

During the past 12 months, California nearly canceled out Texas’s job creation all by itself, losing 112,000 net jobs. Its unemployment rate is above 12 percent.

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Less spending means lower taxes. Texas doesn’t have an income tax — in contrast to California’s highly progressive income tax — and it is among the 10 lowest-tax states in the country. Its regulatory burden is low across the board, and it’s a right-to-work state that enacted significant tort reform in the middle of the last decade.

It is true that Texas enjoys bountiful oil and natural-gas reserves, but its attitude toward those resources is what’s most important — “if you got ’em, use ’em.”

Our attitude is “if you’ve got it and there’s trees on top, leave it alone”.

As Karl du Fresne put it:

There is a much bigger issue here. The New Zealand economy is a crock. We haven’t paid our own way in the world – by that I mean earned more than we spent – since 1973. Our leaders talk optimistically about catching up with other OECD countries, notably Australia, but we’re steadily slipping further behind. Yet we continue to live as if in a fantasy world where we can afford to pamper ourselves with every self-indulgent excess that the consumerist economy dangles in front of us.

We consider it our right to enjoy a standard of living that our parents would never have dared dream of (even though, paradoxically, the country was far more wealthy in their time than it is now). We want to dine in the trendiest restaurants, drink the finest wines, holiday in the most exotic locations and live in the most lavish homes, but we don’t want to vex ourselves wondering whether the economy is prosperous enough to sustain this lifestyle.

It’s a crying shame that we chose to make money from people looking at the trees, rather than making money from the resources under the trees, while also making money from people looking at how we managed to do both without compromising either.