Bad Takes: Texas’ right-wing extremism is driving away smart folks the state needs

Not everybody is fully aware of Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar’s job duties or even the preferred pronunciation of his title. Turns out, “controller” is the favored way to say it.

Essentially, Hegar is the state’s chief accountant and, in addition to overseeing tax collection and managing government purchases and audits, he signs checks for whatever Gov. Greg Abbott and the Lege deign to spend money on.

In other words, not teacher pay raises.

Back in May, at the Texas GOP Convention, Hegar tried his best to energize tired delegates by flinging familiar red meat.

“I wouldn’t be very Texan, you wouldn’t be very Texan, if we didn’t pick on California,” Hegar goaded before referencing the Golden State’s then-gigantic budget deficit. California has since “roughly balanced” its books according to the nonpartisan fiscal adviser for its legislature, but let’s leave that aside.

Hegar went on to appreciate how fortunate we are that “conservative Republicans are still calling the shots here in Texas,” and claimed “our job growth continues to outpace everybody, year after year after year.”

Actually, in terms of year-over-year percentage increases, Texas ranks 10th in job growth, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, behind the likes of Vermont and Colorado, which — checks notes — voted for Kamala Harris. Leave that aside as well.

“When I first took office, I told you that Texas — the state that we call home, the state that we love — was the 12th-largest economy in the world. But, you know, since that time, I can’t tell you that Texas is the 12th-largest economy anymore. You know why? Because we moved to No. 11, then No. 10, then No. 9, and as I stand here today, Texas is the eighth-largest economy in the entire world. And that’s thanks to conservative leadership.”

Please no one tell Hegar that California is currently the fifth-largest economy in the world — and for the seventh straight year. Not bad for a state that’s typically depicted as a fascist hellscape in MAGA folklore.

Early in 2023, the New York Times‘ resident non-loco conservative, David Brooks, had already added an important qualification to the “simple story” that Hegar proffered whereby “Republican policies work, Democratic policies don’t.”

“When you look inside the red states at where the growth is occurring, you notice immediately that the dynamism is not mostly in the red parts of the red states,” Brooks explained. “The growth is in the metro areas — which are often blue cities in red states. A study from the LBJ Urban Lab, for example, found that Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth accounted for 71% of the jobs created in Texas in 2019.”

And this November, all three cities, as well as San Antonio, went for — checks notes a second time — Kamala Harris.

“Republicans may be proud that many of their states are growing,” Brooks rejoined, “but Austin is not the Conservative Political Action Conference’s utopia.”

Then why, pray tell, do so many right-wingers enjoy reminding us that more people move to Texas than any other state in the country?

Wouldn’t you know, this month Dallas Morning News Assistant Business Editor Kyle Arnold broke some bubbles.

“For the first time in five years,” he wrote, “Texas was downgraded from an inbound migration state to neutral for those moving from other states in the U.S., according to a new report from Atlas Van Lines.”

The Migration Patterns Study, conducted since 1993, tracks where Atlas’ customers relocate and aligns the data with Census surveys.

“Real estate data company Zillow shows the median price of a new home in Texas has surged by over 40% since 2019,” and “the average annual temperature in Dallas-Fort Worth is 4 degrees higher than it was a decade ago,” Arnold wrote of the falloff.

Apparently, for some people, not even the fool’s gold of Texas’ zero progressive income tax can beat its increasingly extreme heat.

Even before the new info though, a sizable asterisk remained next to Texas’ purportedly magnetic attraction. Fockers like Donald Trump’s de facto vice president Elon Musk have saved beaucoup billions using our state like his own private Panamanian tax haven.

And as corporations chase cheap labor and “business-friendly” deregulation, the mute compulsion of “mobility clauses” may explain why workers decamp to Texas better than any love for bluebonnets or abortion bans or soccer fields free of transgender children.

And even if your top priority was attracting capital investment, Texas’ so-called anti-“Environmental, Social and Governance” legislation may cost us big. My favorite Republican, Sarah Stogner — who recently ousted a Democratic district attorney in West Texas — explained matters in a November op-ed.

“If a firm seems too friendly to the environment, the Texas Comptroller can put them on a blacklist, banning them from doing any business with state and local governments,” Stogner wrote. “If they acknowledge the potential financial impact of climate change, state pension funds and even county governments issuing bonds can be barred from working with them.”

The upshot?

“By blacklisting many of the best-performing financial firms, state lawmakers reduced competition and left Texas counties fewer options when it came time to issue bonds. A Wharton study estimated that Texas taxpayers were already on the hook for an additional $300 million to $500 million in interest in just the first eight months after the enactment of the law.” This further undermined “industry’s efforts to remain competitive by forcing Texas pension holders to underwrite the worst-polluting wells.”

Houston Chronicle business columnist Chris Tomlinson relayed bleak estimates of his own.

“Texas taxpayers could end up paying $22 billion in excess interest payments, thanks to the Republican-led Legislature, Gov. Abbott and Comptroller Hegar,” Tomlinson said.

A headline from left-of-center magazine The New Republic last autumn appears to sum it up: ”The red state brain drain isn’t Coming. It’s happening right Now.”

Seems that all the censored books, quashed anti-racist curricula, mass shootings, contraceptive restrictions and assorted “culture war” hogwash is “pushing out young professionals” from theocracy-curious states. If you were a woman fresh out of graduate school, would you volunteer to live under a legal regime that might leave you to die in a hospital parking lot rather than allow you to receive standard reproductive care?

As a lifelong Texan, my attitude when I see California plates on the road is reminiscent of the misogynist Vaudevillian comic who walks in on his wife in bed with his best friend: “I have to, buddy, but you?”

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This article appears in Dec 26, 2024 – Jan 1, 2025.