An op-ed written in the L.A. Times by confessed left-leaner Rick Wartzman, may well be the first crack in the dam of case-hardened, liberal doctrine. Entitled Texas, the Jobs Engine, the article is just chock full of delicious quotes, several of which I'll reproduce here for those of you who don't want to read the original. First is Wartzman's admission of his political leanings:
That's right, Texas: the reddest of red states, home to gun lovers and school textbooks that openly question whether the Founding Fathers intended for the separation of church and state. I am no ideologue. Still, whenever I get political, I tend to tilt reflexively to the left, making the jobs figure a bit disconcerting at first.
While he tries dutifully to put some leftist spin on the reasons for the success of the Texas economy, for example, by pointing out that Texas is a huge energy producing state while conveniently neglecting the fact that the failing California economy is also one of the nation's top energy producers, Wartzman can't help but conclude Texas must be doing something right.
But even with these significant caveats, Texas has long been the most robust jobs engine in the country, and its policies and practices deserve deeper reflection.
Wartzman even touches on the possibility that the Democrats, with their failed impossible dream of every American being a homeowner and the resultant housing/mortgage disaster, could learn something from Texas.
Also deserving of further exploration are the strict lending guidelines that Texas banks instituted after the S&L crisis of the 1980s. Those standards spurred institutions to keep larger capital reserves and take on fewer problem mortgages than were seen elsewhere in the country. As a result, the state emerged relatively unscathed from the most recent real estate meltdown.
Then he really dives into the deep water behind the dam of doctrinaire liberal thought with this admission which will no doubt put him on liberals' and trial lawyers' ten most-wanted list:
At the same time - and this, of course, is the tough part for those on the left to swallow - it is clear that the state's limits on taxes, regulations and lawsuits are contributing to the job machine. "The most important thing I think that's happened to us is tort reform," Fisher, the Dallas Fed president, has said. He added that when John Deere and other companies have decided to hire in Texas, they've been largely driven by steps the state has taken to cap non-economic damages in medical malpractice suits and to make it harder to bring product liability and class-action cases.
Fisher is Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve bank , himself no knuckle-dragging conservative as Wartzman shows by citing Fisher's Democrat bonafides:
For those whose knee-jerk instinct is to dump on such logic, they would do well here to consider the source. Fisher served in President Carter's Treasury Department and as a high-ranking trade official for President Clinton, and was a two-time Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Although the former investment banker is certainly not an ardent leftie, he is no right-wing zealot either.
That this op-ed appears in a liberal newspaper like the Times, which happens to be in the state most victimized by Texas' economic success, is indicative that the common-sense conservative approach to business development and job creation implemented by Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Legislature may be sinking into some liberal psyches at last. As I have said before here at American Thinker, the strongest message that Republicans can deliver to the American electorate in the coming campaign is to contrast the success of Texas, because of that common-sense approach, with the failed nonsensical economic policies of the Obama Administration and the Democrat Party where it controls statehouses and state legislatures, as in California.
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