Taxation and migration

A.S. at The Economist explains that people move to Texas because the taxes are low:

IN THE ten years I’ve lived in New York I forgot how to drive. Lately I’ve been spending lots of time in Austin, Texas. Enough so that I’ve had to start driving again. When you go many years without driving, it becomes terrifying. So to refresh my skills I took lessons with a wonderfully patient and brave woman who has taught driving in Austin for nearly thirty years. I expected to be one of her few adult students, but no. My instructor claimed in the past few years the number of adult students increased exponentially, not quite rivalling the number of teenagers. Most are tech workers who come from all over the world, drawn by the vigorous labour market. Adult driving students struck me as a rather interesting economic indicator. It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Migration statistics reveal that people are moving in droves to Texas. Why? Jobs and no state income taxes. High earning New Yorkers and Californians can take home between 9% and 11% more of their income by moving to Texas. Every trip down I speak to at least one bitter New Yorker/Californian fed up with high taxes and cost of living.

Yglesias responds:

Well . . . maybe. Texas certainly is growing rapidly, and it does have a relatively healthy labor market. But even though a lot of people are moving to Texas, it seems to me that California’s population is also growing at an impressive clip:




I suspect A.S. is being somewhat misled by this fascinating interactive tool which charts domestic migration only and thus gives the impression that certain places are experiencing massive net population flight when in fact they’re just attracting a lot of immigrants.

So successful citizens are moving to low tax states while less well off immigrants head to high welfare states. Is anyone surprised?

I'm all for open immigration, but I'd much rather live with a red state's economy. As should anyone who's interested in a healthy labor market with low taxes and welfare. Among people who feel the same, the Economist's point stands.

Alas, the problems with Texas are certainly not economic—rather, they are called Texans.

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

California may move to block the Texasbook changes.

Blesed is she who comes in the name of the Lord!

I think Jesus touched her happyspot. (blame reddit)

By the way, this is at a public university in Texas. (As if you couldn't have guessed.)

Play them stereotypes

Texas to have the largest city in America without a bookstore.

94% abstinence-only in Texas

Staggering:

[W]hen it comes to teenage births, the United States is backsliding. Between 1991 and 2005 the teenage birth rate declined by 34%, according to the National Centre for Health Statistics. Between 2005 and 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, it crept up 5%.

[..] Consider Texas. The state requires only that public schools emphasise abstinence, not that they forsake all other approaches. Any district could choose to be more comprehensive. But few do. Last year the Texas Freedom Network, a religious-freedom watchdog, gathered curricular materials from the state’s public-school districts. Their findings, published earlier this year, are disturbing. Fully 94% of the districts took the abstinence-only approach. Those pamphlets and brochures that bothered to discuss contraceptives were often full of errors, or deliberately misleading.

The materials also traded on shame and fear. Across the state teenagers were warned that premarital sex could lead to divorce, suicide, poverty and a disappointed God. One district staged a skit about a young couple on their honeymoon. The husband presented his bride with a beautiful wrapped present that he had been saving for years. Her gift for him was in tatters.

This approach does not seem to be working.

Texas vs. Scotland

America's smallest bank

Adds Perry:

Oakwood Bank...has about $3 million in total assets and about $2.13 million in total deposits (link here).

In contrast, America's largest bank, Bank of America, has about $1.50 billion of assets and $1 billion of deposits, about 500 times the size of Oakwood (link here).

Leaving port

A 3.5 hour run through the Houston Ship Channel sped to 3 minutes:



Click the HQ, then add a soundtrack when it starts:

Link blag

One American interrogator killed herself...

"Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed."

NYT editorial explains the silliness of the Right's preoccupation with shaking Chavez' hand.

naked capitalism: Enjoy dollar hegemony while it lasts.

Connecticut legislates gay marriage, meaning all the misplaced cries of judicial fiat hold even less water.

Sen. Jim Webb says marijuana legalization should be on the table. Any year now, sanity threatens to break out.

Nate Silver divides Texas.

Mt. Everest gets cell phone service.

Human lungs breathing outside the body (video)

How did the oil get to Alaska?

Joe Barton (R-TX) doesn't have a middle school science textbook handy:



Later, he tweets:



Um, right--what a fool.

Let Texas secede?

Nate goes there:

-- If Texas were not in the Union, the Democrats would currently have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate -- or at least they would once Al Franken gets seated. This is because, in a 98-seat Senate, only 59 votes would be required to break a filibuster.
-- If Texas were not in the Union, the Republicans would operate from a significantly weakened position in the House, since the net 8-vote advantage their congressional delegation gives them in the state (they have 20 seats to the Democrats' 12) is by far their largest.
-- If Texas were not in the Union, George W. Bush would never have become President in 2000 -- not because he'd be constitutionally ineligible (Bush, despite his Texas twang, was born in posh New Haven, Connecticut). Rather, he wouldn't have had enough Electoral Votes to defeat Al Gore.
-- If Texas were not in the Union, Barack Obama would have won the Electoral College 389-147 instead of 365-173 (note that there are two fewer votes total, because there would be two fewer Senators). The vast majority of Texas' electoral votes would be redistributed to lib'rul states like California (which would go from having 55 electoral votes to 59) and New York (34 rather than 31):
-- If Texas were not in the Union, Bush would still have defeated John Kerry 269-267, but Kerry would have an easier go of things, winning the election if he'd won either Iowa or New Mexico; he would not have had to win Ohio or Florida.
-- If Texas were not in the Union, there'd be a good case for making football an Olympic sport, which would sure as hell beat rhythmic gymnastics.

It would sure rid us of plenty wackos like those trying to change science textbooks. Without them, I bet the GOP would have to become more moderate in order to be an appealing party again.

So, why not let Texas go?

Update: New Rasmussen poll shows 75% of Texans don't wish to secede. That's a relief...er, sort of.

Update II: Yglesias doesn't think Texas should secede, but he gives the unlikely scenario some serious analysis.

Link blag

Sen Burr (R-NC) Foolishly encourages bank runs. I keep asking myself, when did the GOP transition from fiscally responsible to financially insane? Is the FDIC too complicated a government agency for some of them to understand the value of? The United States Constitution requires Senators to be of age at least 30. Perhaps we should change that to IQ at least 130?

Recession silver lining? Misguided social conservatives aren't having much luck with their legislation, as moderates focus on real problems:

school prayer and discouraging teaching evolution has been declared dead. Prospects don't look good for a proposal to require ultrasounds for first-trimester abortions. Same goes for a bill to make marriage licenses more expensive for couples who don't take a premarriage education course.

WSJ: Fight piracy with convoys?

DoD Buzz explains the SEAL techniques likely used against pirates.

James Fallows gets an anecdotal take on the state of Iraq.

WSJ: Oregon plans to hike beer tax by 1900%

Politico: Obama will simplify the tax code? More from AP.

Texas governor thinks the state could leave the union. Didn't we have a war to settle that? HotAir calls him down.

David Frum shares my anger at Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and public school teachers' unions.

Megan: Why does Canada have cost-effective healthcare? Location, location, location.

Yglesias: Merely seeing salad on a menu makes you more likely to order junk food.

Radley listens to more left-wing radio.

Size of Alaska

Larger than you think:



Comparative land areas (excludes water):

Contiguous US: 7,664 thousand km²
Alaska: 1,519 thousand km² (20% of the contiguous states)
Texas: 679 thousand km² (9% of contiguous, 45% of Alaska's size)

Of course, Alaska has less than 3% the population of Texas.

Well that didn't last long

Texas is once again doomed:

[State] Board of Education creationist Barbara Cargill today proposed an amendment to the science standards saying that teachers have to tell their students there are different estimates for the age of the Universe. This is not even a veiled attempt to attack the Big Bang model of the Universe, which clearly, and through multiple lines of evidence, indicates the Universe is 13.7 +/- 0.12 billion years old.

So Ms. Cargill is right, if she means that "different estimates" range from 13.58 to 13.82 (given one standard deviation) billion years old.

But she doesn’t mean that at all, does she? If you read her website, you’ll see she’s an out-and-out creationist. She has a large number of, um, factual errors on her site that are clearly right out of the Creationist Obscurational Handbook.

Anyway, her antiscience amendment passed 11 - 3.

So tomorrow that will go to the final vote on whether it will be added to the standards or not. With such a majority voting to pass it along, it looks like it will pass,

The only silver lining I can see here is that it apparently only lets teachers lie to their students, instead of requiring it to be in physics textbooks which would affect other states.

Science barely holds out in Texas

The State Board of Education's creationist amendment fails on a 7-7 tie and the final vote isn't complete yet.

This has implications for the rest of the country because if Texas inserts anti-science provisions in its textbook standards, many publishers will conform to it in all states for cost-effectiveness reasons.

Dammit Texas, stop trying to put your religion in kids' biology textbooks.

"I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban..."

Here's what Pete Sessions (R-Texas), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee had to say about the stimulus:

Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors. "And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that's not what we're saying. I'm saying an example of how you go about is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.

*facepalm*