The so-called free-market miracle of Texas

Daniel Gross pulls out real numbers to show that the economic "miracle" of Texas was made possible by massive growth of state government:

[T]here's less than meets the eye to the Texas miracle. When a state's population grows, it has to add more public employees to provide services — more cops, more teachers, more DMV clerks. This chart posted by Ryan Avent of the Economist shows that Texas's jobs growth in recent years has come mostly from the oil and gas industry, and from things funded by the government: education, healthcare, and federal and state employment. This chart posted by blogger Matt Yglesias shows that Texas's government payroll has been in a huge, long-term uptrend. Jared Bernstein, former economic aide to Vice President Joe Biden, notes that Rick Perry's Texas has been the capital of government job creation. From 2007 through 2010, Texas lost 53,000 jobs on net, not a bad performance in an era when the U.S. economy shed several million. But that's because it lost 178,000 private sector jobs while adding 125,000 public sector ones. Notes Bernstein: "47% of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas."
But there's more . . . In 2010, while Rick Perry was railing against government spending his actions betrayed his words:
Perry himself entered Texas into controversial contracts with Washington lobbyists who helped bring billions of dollars in federal money to Perry's home state, some of it via earmarks. Some of those lobbyists would wind up pleading guilty in a separate major bribery scandal.

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The unverifiable, but unquestionably high, cost of alleged safety

Common Dreams lays out many of the vast sums that Americans pay for it's military, wars, homeland security and other allegedly necessary services related to our protection since 9/11. It adds up to $8 trillion dollars. Common Dreams then asks to what extent these vast expenditure are actually making us safer, but there is no dependable answer available.

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SEC busy destroying evidence regarding Wall Street crooks

In this month's Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports that the SEC is busy erasing the past, intentionally destroying entire files from past investigations, many of which would be relevant to investigating recent Wall Street misconduct:

The widespread destruction of records was brought to the attention of Congress in July, when an SEC attorney named Darcy Flynn decided to blow the whistle. According to Flynn, who was responsible for helping to manage the commission's records, the SEC has been destroying records of preliminary investigations since at least 1993. After he alerted NARA to the problem, Flynn reports, senior staff at the SEC scrambled to hide the commission's improprieties. As a federally protected whistle-blower, Flynn is not permitted to speak to the press. But in evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. . . . [T]o date, federal and state prosecutors have yet to put a single senior Wall Street executive behind bars for any of the many well-documented crimes related to the financial crisis. Indeed, Flynn's accusations dovetail with a recent series of damaging critiques of the SEC made by reporters, watchdog groups and members of Congress, all of which seem to indicate that top federal regulators spend more time lunching, schmoozing and job-interviewing with Wall Street crooks than they do catching them. As one former SEC staffer describes it, the agency is now filled with so many Wall Street hotshots from oft-investigated banks that it has been "infected with the Goldman mindset from within."

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