Governor Perry and the Texas Jobs Miracle:

The State Controlled Media is and will be working overtime to debunk the Texas jobs explosion that has taken place under for Governor Bush and currently under Governor Perry.  IBD puts some of these lies to rest...

As the result, they've been throwing anything and everything at the wall — no matter how tenuous — hoping something will stick.
Texas' job-growth story is a myth. Time magazine's Massimo Calabresi claims, "Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009." And besides, its unemployment rate is "only" a point below the national average.  Fact is, Texas kept its unemployment level below the national average despite a huge influx of people. And from June 2009 to June 2011, Texas accounted for more than half of all net jobs created in the country, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

But they were all government jobs. U.S. News & World Report's Rick Newman claims that official employment data for Texas show "virtually all of those new jobs are in the government sector, not in private enterprise."  But since the recession ended two years ago, government jobs accounted for just 44,000 of the 298,600 net new jobs in Texas, according to the BLS. Also, private jobs in Texas are up 3% since June 2009 compared with a piddling 0.9% nationwide.

Well, they were mostly minimum-wage jobs. Critics in the press point out that the state has a lot of workers drawing low income. "The miracle is that anyone would call minimum-wage jobs a miracle," opined Huffington Post reporter Jason Cherkis.We'll leave it to liberals to explain why minimum-wage jobs are worse than no jobs at all. In any case, job growth in Texas has been widespread. In the past year, construction jobs grew more than 5%, professional services 4.5%, hospitality 3%. Plus, as our National Issue story pointed out this week, wages in Texas have climbed faster than the national average since May 2008 — 7.4% vs. 5%.

So what? Perry didn't have anything to do with the Texas job growth machine. "From Gov. Ann Richards to Gov. George W. Bush to Gov. Rick Perry, the state has exploded in population and jobs," says NPR's Wade Goodwyn.  This is an odd critique — blame Perry for continuing business-friendly policies that encourage companies to come, stay and grow. You'd think if these policies have worked in Texas for two decades, that would be all the more reason to adopt them nationally.

Perry is a spendthrift. Aman Batheja of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that government spending under Perry climbed faster then under Bush's governorship, which is presumably meant to undermine his credentials as a fiscal hawk.

No, wait, he's a heartless budget cutter. "The state made massive across-the-board cuts to state agencies — including $4 billion in public school cuts over two years," claims the Huffington Post's Cherkis.

In any case, he isn't spending enough on liberal priorities. To hear reporters tell it, Texas doesn't devote enough tax dollars to education, anti-poverty programs, health care, etc. Typical is Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, who laments that "Perry seems quite comfortable with the state's lagging performance in what we might term the pursuit-of-happiness index," and who compares Texas to a Third World country.
So, according to Meyerson, the half-million people who moved to Texas from other parts of the country in just the past few years are, what, idiots?  Fact is, Texas has done remarkably well over the past two years, despite Obama's oppressive economic policies.  No wonder journalists are having such a hard time agreeing on why Perry's Texas record is actually bad news.