Why Texas Leads the Recovery - Gov. Rick Perry?

From "Who Will Lead the Recovery? Start With Texas" by Josh Freedman, National Journal, 9-11-10.

Freedman maintains that there is agreement between experts on which state will lead the country to a solid economic recovery. "Nobody's messing with Texas."

Although the economy has slowed in recent months the prospects for a robust recovery are still looking up for the Lone Star State. Texas gained 14,000 jobs in June (2010) even as employment fell in 27 other states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That brought Texas's total for the first half of 2010 to 178,700 - more than twice that of any other state.

How did that happen?

A key factor has been the state's energy production. "If you look at the first half of 2008, the U.S. [economy] had started to decline, but Texas was still growing," said Keith Phillips, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Oil and natural-gas prices were very strong, he explained, and so "we entered the recession late."

But energy production is not all there is to Texas.

"The best places are centers that use that energy resource to diversify their economies," said Doug Henton, the CEO at Collaborative Economics, a consulting firm.

High-tech centers in Austin and Dallas have created an economy ranging "from cow chips to computer chips," as the Fed's Phillips put it. A tech-heavy index of the best-performing cities in the country last year by the Milken Institute, an economic think tank, ranked Austin first and placed three other Texas locales - Killeen and environs, McAllen and Houston - in the top five.

So the five top-performing cities in the U.S. are, first, Austin, then some city outside Texas, then three more Texas cities - Killeen, McAllen and Houston. Four out of five ain't too shabby.

Could it be something in the water in Texas? Nah - just a very, very good Governor!

(All emphases added.)

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(Other also-mentioned's were North Dakota, Oklahoma (especially Oklahoma City), the San Francisco Bay Area, Pittsburg, North Virginia (D.C. jobs), Huntsville, Alabama (government jobs), Tennessee, Georgia and Smyrna, Tennessee (Nissan jobs)