http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/340276/texas-trumps-governor-moonbeam-john-fund
Texas governor Rick Perry knows how to start a rumble. Last week, he spent a mere $24,000 on radio ads in California, urging firms there to move to Texas, with its “zero state income tax, low overall tax burden, sensible regulations, and fair legal system.” The ad goaded Governor Jerry Brown into telling reporters that Perry’s effort wasn’t news. “It’s not a burp,” he sneered. “It’s barely a fart.”
The Sacramento Bee, the leading paper in California’s state capital, went beyond Governor Moonbeam’s sneer by running a long editorial that roundly trashed Texas and Perry: “Actually, we think it’s more than a fart. It’s a cry for help. Perry can’t create jobs, he can only steal them from other states. His campaign for the Republican presidential nomination was a joke. His beloved Dallas Cowboys haven’t been in the Super Bowl since 1996.” The liberal Bee then offered to organize a “book drive” to help Texans graduate more high-school students, suggested that the Lone Star State could spend more on “mental health services,” and quoted the late Texas liberal Molly Ivins’s put-down of her native state as “a low-tax, low-service state.” “We can afford to do better,” the Bee quotes Ivins as saying. “We just don’t.”
But several observers acknowledged that Perry has gotten the better of the battle.
“Perry’s getting exactly what he wanted,” Gavin Newsom, the former Democratic mayor of San Francisco and now the state’s lieutenant governor, told radio station KQED. “He’s getting all kinds of press up and down the state, and why? Well, because he’s leaning in. He’s in the game. He’s getting in our heads.” Newsom ought to know. In 2011, he accompanied a group of state legislators on a fact-finding trip to Texas to interview former California business owners about their reasons for moving. Newsom told me at the time: “I am impressed with the focus on job creation I’ve seen here. We need to have a more balanced business climate in California.”
Indeed, in the last five years Texas has gained 400,000 new jobs while California has lost 640,000. The Lone Star State’s rate of job growth was 33 percent higher than California’s last year, even as the Golden State finally pulled out of the recession.
Perry may be politically weakened after last year’s failed presidential bid. He has also accumulated many years’ worth of political barnacles since he first held office (as a Democratic state representative) in 1984. But should he choose to run for a fourth term as governor next year, he will have a good story to tell. Texas’s legislature has just trimmed its $188 billion two-year budget by 8 percent, and the state may have more revenue than it can legally spend because it is barred from raising outlays more than the rate of economic growth. “This state is foremost geared to fostering a business climate that creates jobs,” Governor Perry told me last year. “We can do more good in other areas if first we ensure people can support and raise their families.” By contrast, California appears to have different priorities. Many of its residents pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of artistic, political, and social experimentation. My home state can take pride in that, but it has lost sight of the economic basics that provide the foundation for bringing new ideas and products to fruition. When Lieutenant Governor Newsom and California state legislators visited Texas in 2011, they heard testimony from business leaders there that Texas’s tort reforms had improved job creation. At the time, the papers back in the Golden State were touting their legislature’s latest priority: a bill mandating that all public-school children learn the history of disabled and gay Americans.