The Texas Jobs Machine

Now that the fog of political war has enveloped the debate about jobs and joblessness in Texas, the most I can do is offer some cogent analysis of the statistics.

I am very, very, very far from being competent to lead anyone through this fog, but I do recommend the detailed analysis offered in a blog called Political Math.

The blogger is not a Rick Perry supporter, and he has sufficient command of math and statistics to provide an analysis that factors in most of the relevant variables.

He concludes, thusly: ”My advice to anti-Perry advocates is this: Give up talking about Texas jobs. Texas is an incredible outlier among the states when it comes to jobs. Not only are they creating them, they're creating ones with higher wages.

“One can argue that Perry had very little to do with the job situation in Texas, but such a person should be probably prepare themselves for the consequences of that line of reasoning. If Rick Perry had nothing to do with creating jobs in Texas, than why does Obama have something to do with creating jobs anywhere? And why would someone advocate any sort of "job creating" policies if policies don't seem to matter when it comes to the decade long governor of Texas? In short, it seems to me that this line of reasoning, in addition to sounding desperate and partisan, hogties its adherents into a position where they are simultaneously saying that government doesn't create jobs while arguing for a set of policies where government will create jobs.”