It Ain't Braggin'...

[Lightbringer]

Texas... ftw!

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/ ... rich-lowry

-Light

[The Khan]

Texas... ftw!

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/ ... rich-lowry

-Light

Interesting. By the way, how do the states individually contribute to the taxes in the treasury?(I dont know jack about USA system) Upon whom falls the highest burden of maintaining the military and intelligence forces of USA that protects its economic interests abroad?

[SGTscuba]

wow, I didn't know Texas was doing so well, I wish they would just repeat it everywhere else.

[The Khan]

wow, I didn't know Texas was doing so well, I wish they would just repeat it everywhere else.

One system may fail somewhere else. Not everywhere has the same population and industries available.

On another note, when you explain the success of a state in news, a very broad and vague claim of "avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot," is not convincing.

"keep regulations to a minimum", what regulations and where? "keep regulations to a minimum" could be also interpreted as a throwback to Victorian Britain's London Industry. It is not pretty.

[SGTscuba]

maybe a general cutback on unecessary red tape would probably do the trick for most parts, and would probably make people happier at the same time.

[tkobo]

Now IF only they could learn to make barbeque

[Lightbringer]

Now IF only they could learn to make barbeque

It ain't our fault if the humongous herds of cows trample all the pigs. We could stand to make our sauce a little hotter. I had some stuff in Alabama one time that could not have been much more than liquefied Habanero pepper.

@Khan

The States do not pay in directly to the federal government in most cases. Mostly they help shoulder the financial load by paying big portions of stuff like infrastructure and social programs like Medicaid/Medicare. The Feds get a lot of their money from Income and corporate taxes, amongst other things. Since we have more people... working in more and better jobs... we pay a larger share by simply being prosperous.

As for your skepticism about the phrases. We avoid letting trial lawyers run riot by passing TORT reform laws limiting crazy lawsuits (McDonald's coffee for example). we avoid letting unions strangle our industries like kudzu vines by keeping ourselves a "Right to work" state that limits what Unions can do to non union businesses and employees.

As for the "deregulation" that you fear will cause stinking clouds of coal smoke... Perhaps we aren't the cleanest state, but we are far from the dirtiest. We simply weigh the balance between cost and effect. When measures cost a lot and result in little environmental improvement, we do not enact them. Sometimes we err on the side of business, sometimes on the side of nature. However, in places like California, they simply pass every law and regulation that has the word "Environment" in it, no matter how badly it cripples businesses, and no matter how little (if any) it helps the environment.

-Light

[The Khan]

As for your skepticism about the phrases. We avoid letting trial lawyers run riot by passing TORT reform laws limiting crazy lawsuits (McDonald's coffee for example)

I was a little kid back then, a good part of the readers of that news from Turkey started thinking America being heaven on earth, since we had the polar opposite.

As for the "deregulation" that you fear will cause stinking clouds of coal smoke... Perhaps we aren't the cleanest state, but we are far from the dirtiest. We simply weigh the balance between cost and effect. When measures cost a lot and result in little environmental improvement, we do not enact them. Sometimes we err on the side of business, sometimes on the side of nature. However, in places like California, they simply pass every law and regulation that has the word "Environment" in it, no matter how badly it cripples businesses, and no matter how little (if any) it helps the environment.

-Light

No, no no. I was skeptic about other regulations like work and production regulations like... How to put it straight... Work ethics and living standards and goods ingredients... I hope I put my point.

For example, in Germany, I see that the school cafeteria sends little bits of the food to some health inspection every day. In Turkey, a lot of times students had food poisoning in mess halls and any protests (not just mess hall but other stuff) get put down by policemen armed like freaking SWATS.

[Lightbringer]

@Khan

I'd have to look it up, but at a guess, Texas does not have any serious problems with food safety, dangerous working conditions, or unfair labor exploitation. Again, we might not rank #1, but I do not recall any media mention of us running at the back of the pack. In the same vein as pollution, we have no problems with proper regulations. We simply make some efforts to avoid excessive regulations that strangle business in red tape and massive labor costs. For example, we like safe work places. We do not like things like mandating 12 weeks of vacation per year, or mandating employer funded pensions. Such perks are for the individual to seek out from employers on their own. And trust me, if you get the training and education, you can find jobs that give you such perks. Equality of opportunity, not equality of results.

-Light

[Lightbringer]

CENSUS PROVES LIBERALISM WRONG, DYING!!!

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysi ... 568147&p=2 (check out the whole article, page #1 is good too)

The eight states with no state income tax grew 18% in the last decade. The other states (including the District of Columbia) grew just 8%.

The 22 states with right-to-work laws grew 15% in the last decade. The other states grew just 6%.

The 16 states where collective bargaining with public employees is not required grew 15% in the last decade. The other states grew 7%.

...and in case you were wondering why I put this in my Texas Bragging Thread...

Texas' economy has diversified far beyond petroleum, with booming high-tech centers, major corporate headquarters and thriving small businesses. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of Americans and immigrants, high-skill as well as low-skill. Its wide open spaces made for low housing costs, which protected it against the housing bubble and bust that has slowed growth in Phoenix and Las Vegas.

hehehe

-Lightbringer

(P.S. Chris, please just delete any spitheel comments instead of locking my thread. In fact, if they aren't going to be offensive to anyone but me, just leave them. I'm a big boy, Envy and spiteful hatred don't really phase me.)

[Hundane]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... cit/70077/

[tkobo]

It plugged nearly all of that deficit with $6.4 billion in Recovery Act money, allowing it to leave its $9.1 billion rainy day fund untouched.

In other words,the state had not only enough money to pay its way, but an extra $2.7 billion to boot without the stimulus funds.

This of course shows one of the many problems with handing out money.How many people turned down the "social security" stimulus checks .....When its being handed out, people think "Well, its gonna be pissed away regardless of whether or not i take some, so ill take some".

[fool]

The eight states with no state income tax grew 18% in the last decade. The other states (including the District of Columbia) grew just 8%.

The 22 states with right-to-work laws grew 15% in the last decade. The other states grew just 6%.

The 16 states where collective bargaining with public employees is not required grew 15% in the last decade. The other states grew 7%.

Those numbers are a little crap, you have to admit. Is a hard correlation coefficient for income tax to growth (per capita) too much to ask? Or at least some kind of hint to the methodology, since obviously each of the eight states didn't grow 18%, etc. Just saying, since that is ambiguous as hell.

[Lightbringer]

@Fool

What is ambiguous? Take the states with the tax/union/collective bargaining conditions described, and figure out their population growth. Take the states without and figure out their growth. Very simple math. Any 4th-5th-6th grader does word problems as hard or harder. Are you saying that simple arithmetic is ambiguous? Here, I'll demonstrate.

State 1 had 100 people in 2000, and 110 in 2010. State 2 had 100 people in 2000 and 120 in 2010. At what percentage did their combined populations grow?

You aren't seriously trying to tell me that you cannot figure out averages and %'s... are you Fool? There is nothing ambiguous about these numbers at all. You can try to claim that there is some other causation, but the correlation seems awfully strong to be coincidental.

@Hundane

...and your point is? Texans paid their fair share of Federal income taxes, so why should they turn their backs when Obama and the Progressives start throwing that money around. From the instant that "stimulus" was passed in Congress, the money was spent. What kind of idiot refuses to try and retrieve some of the money that was already stolen from him? Should we have turned it down so that Texan income taxes could go directly to California, Illinois, etc? Refusing the money would not have caused it to be negated and returned. It just would have gone elsewhere. The only part I find distasteful is that it kept us from dealing with the overspending in our State budget and pushed that debate off until right now. Actually a good thing since the Texas legislature is about 2/3's Republican after last November's elections.

As for the rainy day fund and the annual state budget. The Teacher's Unions and the Lefties are screaming that we should use this fund to cover high spending levels and deficits. Let me get this straight. You have a monthly bill, say you subscribe to the uber fancy 5,000 channel cable package with every premium channel. It costs $250 per month. You get your hours cut back at work and can no longer afford this cable bill. Do you... A: Take out a loan to keep paying the cable bill? B: Cash in your life insurance policy? C: Drop down to an affordable cable package?

The rainy day fund is for Hurricane/Disaster type situations, not for paying the monthly premium cable bill.

-Light

[fool]

Well, for one thing, we don't know that it's done as an average (which should really have been stated, although it's almost certain), we don't know whether it's a mean of the states' economic growth percentages or a mean of their total growth percentage, we don't know that it's actually the mean that was taken, rather than another average, we don't know how much of the growth was simply due to population increase since (I assume) they simply took the GDP growth of each state without any reference to population. Maybe these ambiguities wouldn't make a huge difference, but if I'm seeing numbers I like to be precise about what they refer to.
EDIT: Oh, I thought it was about economic growth. Those numbers were just so drastic that I assumed they must have been fiddling the figures somehow. There's far less chance that they'd not just take totals with population growth. Never mind