The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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L.Wood
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The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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The Texas Unmiracle
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 14, 2011

As expected, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, has announced that he is running for president. And we already know what his campaign will be about: faith in miracles.

Some of these miracles will involve things that you’re liable to read in the Bible. But if he wins the Republican nomination, his campaign will probably center on a more secular theme: the alleged economic miracle in Texas, which, it’s often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies. And Mr. Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.

So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.

Rest of NYT column here

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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REPORT: Texas Ranks Dead Last In Total Job Creation, Accounting For Labor Force Growth

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), since he launched his presidential campaign on Saturday, has paraded around the stat that “since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America.” “Now think about that. We’re home to less than 10 percent of the population in America, but 40 percent of all the new jobs were created in that state,” Perry says.

This stat leaves out a lot of the story. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has promoted the number, but “it acknowledges that the number comes out different depending on whether one compares Texas to all states or just to states that are adding jobs.” Between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace inMassachusetts than in Texas.

In fact, “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” The unemployment rate in Texas has been steadily increasing throughout the recession, and went from 7.7 to 8.2 percent while the state was supposedly creating 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S.


How is this possible, since Texas has created over 126,000 jobs since the depths of the recession in February 2009? The fact of the matter is that looking purely at job creation misses a key point, namely that Texas has also experienced incredibly rapid population and labor force growth (due to a series of factors, including that Texas weathered the housing bubble reasonably well due to strict mortgage lending regulations). When this is taken into account, Texas’ job creation looks decidedly less impressive:

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Clearly, there is no miracle for Texas here. While over 126,000 net jobs were created in Texas over the last two and a half years, the labor force expanded by over 437,000, meaning that overall Texas has added unemployed workers at a rate much faster than it has created jobs. And although states like Michigan have lost jobs (29,200 since February 2009), the state’s labor force has shrunk by over 185,000 since then. As a result, while there are fewer jobs, there are significantly less workers looking for them.

Rest of Think Progress story here

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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A State-Backed Miracle
As Perry pushes Texas boom, the press shouldn’t forget one reason behind it
By Greg Marx

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"But there’s an important fact about Texas’s economic record that isn’t really emphasized in any of those articles or blog posts, though it has been flagged in some other sharp coverage lately. Which is: while Perry’s economic vision is undoubtedly conservative, public-sector jobs have played a key role in supporting the Texas labor market.

As he ramps up his presidential campaign, Perry likes to outline an economic strategy that depends on low spending, predictable regulation, and constraints on litigation. It’s an outlook that, at least rhetorically, privileges private-sector work over government jobs.

But as The Wall Street Journal reported last month, during Perry’s decade-long stint as governor, more than 300,000 government jobs have been created in Texas. That’s nearly 30 percent of the state’s overall job growth during that time, and about one-fifth of all new public-sector jobs nationwide.

Columbia Journalism Review has the scoop

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Perry (and Bachmann) pander to the dumbass vote:

"What does Rick Perry really want from the Fed?"

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Texas Governor Rick Perry has been on a Bernanke-bashing binge this week, demanding on Wednesday that the Federal Reserve "open their books up."

That comment comes after Perry said earlier this week that it would be "treasonous" if Chairman Ben Bernanke used Fed policy to stimulate the economy before the election.

But what books exactly does Perry want opened?

The Federal Reserve already publishes its balance sheet online every Thursday for the entire world to see.

Not only that, it is audited regularly. Every year, an external accounting firm audits the financial statements of the Federal Reserve and all 12 of its regional banks. Last year, that firm was Deloitte and Touche, but PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG have also done it over the years.

Those financial statements are also posted online.

"Every aspect of the Fed's financial dealings are wide open -- wide open," Bernanke remarked at the National Press Club earlier this year. "There is no sense in which the Fed has secret financial dealings."
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rest on the link

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Rick Perry’s Hardcore History of Investment in Porn

snip-
“Teens Never Say No” kind of pornography? How about “Teens with T*ts”? No? How about “Bisexual Barebacking Vol. 1” or “Big Tit Brotha Lovers 6”?

Kinda makes you all warm and family values-ish.

Rick Perry, God’s Chosen to pray Texas into prosperity, invested as a private citizen in Movie Gallery corporation to the tune of between 5-10k according to his 1995 personal financial reports. Movie Gallery was, at that time, the largest distributor of porn in America, and able to sell and rent regular videos for much cheaper than the competition due to their heady porn profit. The ultra conservative American Family Association (AFA), a self-described “Christian organization promoting the biblical ethic of decency in American society with primary emphasis on TV and other media” known for “(i)nitiating, encouraging Christian Activism,” but also now an officially designated hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, begged the government to investigate Movie Gallery.

Politicus USA

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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L.Wood
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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Grecian-Formula Perry and "dead peasant" schoolteachers

"WASHINGTON -- Two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2003, top officials from Texas Governor Rick Perry's office pitched an unusual offer to the state's retired teachers: Let's get into the death business.

Perry's budget director, Mike Morrissey, laid out a pitch that was both ambitious and risky, according to notes summarizing the meeting provided to The Huffington Post.

According to the notes, which were authenticated by a meeting participant, the Perry administration wanted to help Wall Street investors gamble on how long retired Texas teachers would live. Perry was promising the state big money in exchange for helping Swiss banking giant UBS set up a business of teacher death speculation.
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Corporations had been using mass purchases of life insurance policies on their employees for years as part of an elaborate tax avoidance scheme (the government doesn't tax insurance premiums or death benefits). The employees themselves -- affectionately referred to as "dead peasants" among insurance experts -- received no benefit.

HuffPO article continues

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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How the Texas Governor Created His State's Budget Crisis
by Lou Dubose | September 1, 2011

He Was Warned
"As of this moment, this legislation is a staggering $23 billion short of the funds needed to pay for the promised property tax cuts over the next five years. … These are conservative estimates."
—Texas Comptroller Carole Strayhorn, warning Gov. Rick Perry about his 2006 tax reform proposal



IN HIS STATE OF THE STATE SPEECH in February, Rick Perry described the $27 billion budget shortfall confronting the Texas Legislature.

"Now, the mainstream media and big government interest groups are doing their best to convince us that we're facing a budget Armageddon," Perry said. "Texans don't believe it and they shouldn't because it's not true."

The $27 billion equaled 15 percent of the $182 billion biennial budget the Legislature had passed two years earlier. If not Armageddon, an apocalyptic loss of revenue in a low-tax state that provides bare-bones public services.

Perry's statement was even more remarkable because most of the budget shortfall was a consequence of a business-tax bill he pushed through the Legislature in a special session five years earlier.

With Perry running for president on a record of fiscal responsibility (and job creation, discussed later in this article), it's important to understand the consequences of his 2006 "business margins tax" — and to ask if the governor knew that the tax reform he proposed would undermine the state's budgets in the years that followed.

First, some background."
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JOBS FOR SALE—By now we all know what Rick Perry is selling. He collaborates with the private sector to create jobs and to attract jobs from other states. The Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technologies Fund, his creations, have had unprecedented success.

It's not as simple as Perry would have you believe.

The two big economic development funds Perry controls operate on a trickle-up economic theory. The state takes money from taxpayers and gives it to corporations to entice them to create new jobs.

Yet corporations often fail to deliver, and the governor and his staff rewrite corporations' contracts to relax their job-creation requirements.

Grants are often made to companies that would move into the state or expand their workforce without a taxpayer-funded incentive.

The governor hands over millions of dollars to corporations whose executives have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.

And Rick Perry holds all the cards. ....
rest is at Washington Spectator

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Gov. Perry’s Cash Machine

The exchange of campaign contributions for government contracts, favors or positions is all too common in Washington and around the country. It has been developed to an especially high art — or more to the point, a low art — by Gov. Rick Perry in Texas. For a presidential contender who insists that big government is the country’s biggest problem, it is particularly cynical.

There are nearly 600 boards, commissions, authorities and departments in Texas, many of which are of little use to the public and should have long been shut down or consolidated. They are of great use to the governor, who more than any predecessor has created thousands of potential appointments for beneficent backers and several pro-business funds that have been generous to allies.

Since 2001, more than a fifth of the $83 million that Mr. Perry has raised for his gubernatorial campaigns has come from people he appointed to state boards and commissions, according to a study by Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog group. Just 150 individuals and couples gave him $37 million of that total, and nearly half received substantial tax breaks, business contracts or appointments from Mr. Perry, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Mr. Perry insists on unquestioned political loyalty in exchange for his patronage, no matter how inappropriate or out of place. In 2009, two members of the Board of Regents of Texas Tech University said the Perry administration pressured them to resign because they supported Mr. Perry’s challenger in the gubernatorial race, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. .....

The Texas Emerging Technology Fund, which has provided $200 million in seed money to high-tech start-ups since 2005, could have turned over its grant-making to independent experts, as most of the other 20 states with similar agencies do. That is not how Mr. Perry works.

rest of report on New York Times

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Gov Perry is a very slow learner! CUTS state fire-fighting funding,now expects FEMA to do the job for him

By Michael Allen on Sep 6, 2011

According to KVUE-TV, the state of Texas, under Gov. Rick Perry, cut state funding for the volunteer fire departments that protect most of the state from wildfires. Firefighters have actually been dipping into their own pockets to fight fires.

Volunteer departments that were already facing financial strain had their funding cut from $30 million to $7 million. There are 879 volunteer fire departments in Texas; 114 are paid fire departments, while 187 departments are a combination of volunteer and paid.

At a press conference Monday, Perry promised to seek federal disaster relief and said that FEMA would be in the state by Wednesday.

While the Texas governor has been highly critical of FEMA in the past, he dodged questions from CBS’ Erica Hill on Tuesday's 'Early Show,' insisting that now was not the time to worry about reforming the agency.

Perry said: “The issue is taking care of these people right now. [DUH] We can work our way through any conversations about how to make agencies more efficient, how to make Department of Defense equipment, for instance, more available. There are a lot of issues we can talk about, but the fact of the matter is now is not the time to be trying to work out the details of how to make these agencies more efficient. Let’s get people out of harm’s way.”

Opposing Views has the scoop...

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Gov Perry and the Texas Medicaid Fiasco. "How Rick Perry's Attempt To Privatize Medicaid Wasted Millions..."
Alternet, Sept 8, 2011

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"In his 2010 book "Fed Up" and in his campaign speeches, Perry has often asserted that the states, simply left to do the job without federal interference, could perform far better. The theme is highly popular, like Perry himself, in tea party circles.

"It is through states that the American people get the job done every day," he wrote in his book, "often in spite of a deeply flawed bureaucratic federal government." Late last year, when he proposed that Texas drop out of Medicaid altogether, he said: "We know how to deliver healthcare to more people in a less expensive way than what the federal government does. I need more states to stand up and say we don't want your strings attached. We don't want you down here telling us how to run our business."
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Although Perry was forced to abandon that scheme when a state report showed that leaving Medicaid would cost Texas billions (and leave even more Texans uninsured), he still claims that the federal government should stop trying to make sure that more Americans have health care, and that programs run solely by the states would be more efficient.

But lately the facts about Perry's own record as governor have begun to emerge -- and they don't support his argument. Over the past several weeks, a Dallas TV station has exposed the"golden teeth" Medicaid scandal in Texas, now under investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Perry appointees who run Medicaid have allowed hundreds of millions of dollars to be misspent on orthodontic braces for children who don't need them -- with huge profits for private dental clinics owned by Wall Street hedge funds.

Nor is that the only aspect of Perry's record that belies his boasting. One of the most embarrassing episodes during his first two terms as governor involved a plan to let private firms run Medicaid, replacing state employees. The privatization plan was an "innovation" that was supposed to save money. What it accomplished instead was to earn enormous sums for contractors like Deloitte Touche and Accenture (along with their Texas lobbyists), while costing taxpayers still more hundreds of millions of dollars -- and all without achieving its most basic objectives.

Four years after the plan was implemented in 2003, the Austin American-Statesman published a thorough report on its results, and what the newspaper found was a project "in shambles." The state had been forced to cancel its contract with the Accenture group and continue to use state employees to perform necessary work on an outdated computer system, exactly the same as before Perry's privatization scheme began. How much had this great innovation cost the state? Approximately $500 million, not including the amount spent using the old system, at roughly $1 million a month. See here

Entire Alternet report is here
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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Perry Tales: Rick Is Not Who He Says He Is
By Jim Hightower

Presidential wannabe Rick Perry is flitting all around the country — hither, thither and yon — spreading little "Perry Tales" about himself and the many wonders he has worked as governor of Texas.

His top Perry Tale is a creationist story about what he has modestly branded "The Texas Miracle." While the rest of the country is mired in joblessness, says the miracle worker, his state has added 1.2 million jobs during his 10-year tenure.

I've built "a job-creating machine," the governor gushed during one of his recent flits across Iowa, and a Perry PR aide smugly added, "The governor's job creation record speaks for itself."

Actually, it doesn't. Far from having the best unemployment rate in the nation, the Lone Star State ranks a middling 26th, behind New York, Massachusetts and other states whose "liberal" governments he routinely mocks.

Worse, probe even a millimeter into the million-jobs number that he is sprinkling around like fairy dust, and you'll learn that Perry's jobs are mostly "jobettes" that can't sustain a family. They come with very low pay, no health care or pension, and no employment security, labor rights or upward mobility — many are only part-time and/or temporary positions.

Here's a particularly revealing stat that the Perry pixies don't want us to see: On his watch as governor, Texas added more minimum wage jobs than all the other 49 states combined. More than half a million Texans now work for $7.25 an hour or less. He can brag that he's brought Texans down into a tie with Mississippi for the highest percentage of workers reduced to poverty pay.

Spreading even more fairy dust, Perry claims that his Texas Miracle is the result of him keeping the government out of the private sector's way. But peek behind that ideological curtain, and you'll find this startling fact: During Perry's decade, the greatest job growth by far has come from the public sector, which has more than doubled the number of new jobs created by the private sector.

Rest of article is at Nation of change, click here.

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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Regarding that bit about Clinton causing the housing crisis...

Rick Perry Bet Big On Tax Grants To Subprime Lenders As Governor

WASHINGTON -- As Texas governor, Rick Perry spent tens of millions in taxpayer money to lure some of the nation's leading mortgage companies to expand their business in his state, calling it a national model for creating jobs. But the plan backfired.

Just as the largest banks began receiving public cash, they aggressively ramped up risky lending. Within four years, the banks were out of business and homeowners across Texas faced foreclosure. In the end, the state paid $35 million to subsidize it.

An Associated Press review of federal mortgage data, court filings and public statements found that Perry downplayed early warnings of an impending mortgage crisis as alarmist. That's even as Perry's own attorney general would later investigate whether Countywide Financial Corp. encouraged homeowners to borrow more than they could afford.

As Perry offered $20 million in grants to Countrywide and $15 million to Washington Mutual Inc. – each blamed for having a major role in one of the country's most serious recessions – he took in tens of thousands of their dollars for his gubernatorial campaign.

...The AP analysis found that Washington Mutual, Countrywide and their subsidiaries boosted risky lending in Texas within a year after receiving grants from the Texas Enterprise Fund. In 2004, only one out of every 100 Washington Mutual loans in the state was originated to homeowners with less-than-perfect credit. The next year, that figure rose to more than one in four."

Huff Po
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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

Post by jamaluddin »

And Mr. Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.
Perry working as a governor in Texas almost a decade. We saw Gardasil scandal and a book against global warming and scientists from him! If Perry become president of USA then I will leave USA!
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Re: The Rick Perry UNmiracle

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Rick Perry's Texas Education Miracle

it's worth a look at the Rick Perry Texas miracle because Republicans love to tout it so much. School spending has been slashed. 12,000 teachers fired. Special ed teachers? Gone. Teachers' aides? Gone. Bus drivers and security guards? Also drastically reduced. Class sizes? Huge.

Protecting rich peoples' take home is more important than having a good school system. But it's not more important than FOOTBALL:
from the NPR article:
"I'd spend a thousand bucks out of pocket myself to make sure it'd stay," says Ross Briton, whose son plays football. "I'd work two jobs if it took that to do it. End of story."

Briton says it's not just a sport here: It's part of the culture and a big part of the community's identity. The district should pare down the curriculum before it cuts football, he says."
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