Texas the new Mississippi?
A few days ago the governor of Texas made some ham-headed statement about seceding from the USA. Most people asked him to not let the door hit him in the posterior on the way out. Most of the world wants to come to America, STILL, and he wants to leave. Who does he think will want to move to his little redneck rump state if it is not part of America?
Anyway, this blog is about business, not emotion, so here we go with the business angle.
I was racking my brain thinking of some innovations to come out of Texas, and I am sure there are some, but other than the Baylor University medical complex, and NASA in Houston, I find it hard to think of anything.
This does not include Texas’s famous steakhouses and their BBQ, both of which are excellent.
Dell is near Austin, but it has never really innovated anything, and is now slowly fading into irrelevance. All it did was ride the boom for about 15 years.
There’s the SXSW festival, but that isn’t innovation.
Southwest is in Texas, and they did innovate a new business model, but they did that back in the 70’s and haven’t changed their secret sauce since then. Jetblue and Virgin America and Spirit and others are making Southwest look more and more like a legacy airline.
The energy companies are concentrated in TX, but try getting them to get off their petroleum crack pipe…it just ain’t happening.
Possibly the only good things in Texas are the rent contol laws (there are none, resulting in plentiful cheap housing) and zoning laws (there are none, resulting in plentiful and cheap housing and industrial).
Mercifully, this state senator in Texas put me out of my misery by publishing this list of Texas ‘firsts’:
1) 49th in teacher pay
2) 1st in the percentage of people over 25 without a high school diploma
3) 41st in high school graduation rate
4) 46th in SAT scores
5) 1st in percentage of uninsured children
6) 1st in percentage of population uninsured
7) 1st in percentage of non-elderly uninsured
3rd in percentage of people living below the poverty level
9) 49th in average Women Infant and Children benefit payments
10) 1st in teenage birth rate
11) 50th in average credit scores for loan applicants
12) 1st in air pollution emissions
13) 1st in volume of volatile organic compounds released into the air
14) 1st in amount of toxic chemicals released into water
15) 1st in amount of recognized cancer-causing carcinogens released into air
16) 1st in amount of carbon dioxide emissions
17) 50th in homeowners’ insurance affordability
18) 50th in percentage of voting age population that votes
19) 1st in annual number of executions
http://shapleigh.org/system/news_article/document/882/Texas_on_the_Brink_2007_Final.pdf
seceding from the USA would be the best thing for Texas. Under the law this can be done. Texas being the only state that can. You can look at what we have, and we can put a hurting on the other states. All the way from gas and oil to space. We can do somthing about the border, since most people in Texas has guns. So don’t mess with Texas, can any one eles do the same? Before you talk out of your ass look and see what Texas has and what the rest of the country dont have, and what they get from Texas.