House of Eratosthenes

Texas will pick up four more congressional seats, expanding the state’s U.S. House delegation to 36 seats and further boosting Texas political clout in the nation’s Capitol.

Texas had the biggest increase of any state as the Census Bureau announced new congressional apportionment based on population shifts over the past decade.

Eric Torbinsen jots down a few ideas — just a few of the ideas — why the rush is taking off in that direction (hat tip to blogger friend Gerard). He’s speaking from personal experience.

New York, I love you — but I can’t make the math work.

Like lots of media professionals (and fashion mavens, artists, musicians, et al.), I’ve penciled out the numbers for what it would mean to take a job in New York City. There’s barely enough room on the back of the envelope for subtracting the double-dose income tax hit from the city and state, and that’s before even adjusting for cost of living.

That’s one of the reasons I’m in Dallas. You know, Texas, the state that parlayed this year’s census data into four new House seats — pinching the two lost by the Empire State — because people actually want to live here.

Lots of Texas professionals love New York this way: fly in for $200 round trip, suck down the city’s beefy marrow of culture for a weekend and jet back to live cheap and pay no income tax. It’s all the pleasure and we keep our treasure.

Folks are voting with their pocketbooks; between 2000 and 2008, $846 million of New York’s personal income saddled up and jingle-jangled down to the Lone Star State.
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Texas creates jobs like a fiend, in part because businesses large and small have no worry of obstacles such as plaintiff-friendly courts, consumer-friendly regulators or oversight-friendly lawmakers. Pro-business isn’t just a mantra; they put it in the water.

It should be noted that Texas has a budget problem like everybody else. But it hasn’t completely exhausted its revenue streams, its credit, its options like a lot of the blue states — in particular, New York, and my own, California.

In places like ours, we have put up a vivid illustration of how a state government can not work. It’s gotten to the point where our newspapers are exquisitely boring because they can’t print any real news. It’s all “here’s a case study of someone pathetically dependent on such-and-such a program, and they don’t know what they’re gonna do because it’s getting cut, aw boo hoo hoo.” Turn the page, it’s the same thing. Wait a day, buy the same paper, it’s the same thing. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Daily digest of a failed system.

If you’re not buying the paper for the crossword puzzles or the comics, you’ve got no use buying it. It’s fish wrap. And I mean that as no slight against the talent of the writers. It’s the information going into it; the material. The story never changes and they’ve got nothing to work with, they only update the numbers.

So now there’s a census, and with it, hard statistics behind the massive population shift we knew was happening already.

Hey — if now is not the time to draw some conclusions about how government should & should not be run…then what’s the event we’re looking for? What’s it take?

It’s all “here’s a case study of someone pathetically dependent on such-and-such a program, and they don’t know what they’re gonna do because it’s getting cut, aw boo hoo hoo.” Turn the page, it’s the same thing. Wait a day, buy the same paper, it’s the same thing. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Daily digest of a failed system.

You mean like a clump of trees in a Hanna Barbera cartoon? 🙂

The other morning our paper had some tear-jerker story like that on the front page, and the wife said, “That’s it. This place is gettin’ too liberal. We’re movin’ to Texas”. So I had to play the song for her.
- philmon | 12/29/2010 @ 07:40
Yea, unfortunately, a lot of those people going to Texas are liberals who will, in due time, demand the very policies that caused them to flee their previous abode… Here’s to hoping Texas can withstand that, because I’m likely going there too.
- KG | 12/29/2010 @ 11:43
Phil: re: Chris Rea (heh). I drove my co-workers NUTS with that song my last year in SFO. Every time something went stupid, out came Chris. To lotsa eye-rolls and snarky comments to the effect of “Go, already!” The stock reply was “Soon, baby… soon!” And so it came to pass, even tho I didn’t make it ALL the way back. (I’m ten miles west of the state line here on The High Plains of New Mexico.)

I never did surrender my TX drivers license in the two and a half years I spent in SFO, which saved me the hassle of re-converting. We got big long roads out here…
- bpenni | 12/29/2010 @ 11:55
Yes, KG, that thought had occurred to me. Maybe the libs who move to Texas can become, ahem, “acculturated”.

Got a kid from Queens, NY that moved down here to Missouri a few years ago and we already have him fishing, rally racing, and shooting skeet with shotguns. So maybe there’s hope. 🙂

And Buck, as you might expect, I love me some Chris Rea. And every time I play him, the wife says “Who is this? I really like his voice.”
- philmon | 12/29/2010 @ 12:48
The trick about emigrating to a foreign country like Texas from places like the Peoples Republic of New York or Kalifornia, is to adopt the culture. Not hard if you are already a conservative. The important thing to do is force the other immigrants to adopt the culture. No balkanization allowed, no muslim-like infiltration and domination in order to create a new caliphate.You socialize and talk to your neighbors. You find out who might be willing to try to drag in some leftist ideology and you either educate them out of that nonsense, or you intimidate them into leaving. And no, I’m not kidding.
- Moshe Ben-David | 12/29/2010 @ 13:33
…or you intimidate them into leaving. And no, I’m not kidding.

Morgan Montgomery Freeberg Burns tents his fingers together and mutters “eeeeeexcellent.” But I have a hunch the conversation starts getting really good when we discuss details and methods.

Eat a dog sandwich in front of them? Smirk & swagger in front of them GWB style?

Take out last night’s beer bottles in your back yard with a .357?
- mkfreeberg | 12/29/2010 @ 13:50
you are kidding about texas creating jobs?

Don’t know if you realize it or not, but I’m 70 miles nw of san antonio and 95 miles west of austin and damned near homeless after spending 30 years in the software biz….

Virgil
http://www.KeepAmericaAtWork.com
- vbierschwale | 12/29/2010 @ 16:33
I definitely hear ya, Virgil. A software industry needs a lot of things, much like an acre of farmland needs nutrients and hospitable climate and sunshine and water and work. For about a decade now, the retail technology consumer is interested in not-a-whole-lot…whatever earth-shattering new hardware interface there is (iPad, et al) and carrying around a big ol’ bucket of personal tunes. It pains me to say this, but at the end of 2010 that pretty much covers it. So anyone who’s figured out a new algorithm for sorting millions of index nodes…hey, that easily would’ve made you a millionaire in 1984. Now you might as well bury your discovery in a time capsule — not that we’ve conquered the final frontier of database indexing, it just won’t get anything to market that will be profitable. All the talents that might contribute to a successful software career, nowadays enjoy the same market-conveyance support that Leonardo Da Vinci had: None. Put it in a charcoal sketchbook, and in five hundred years maybe people will call you a genius. But all these skills plus two dollars will get you a coffee.

Also, software businesses are businesses. Businesses, right now, will move mountains to avoid hiring anybody. So the acre of farmland is going through a tough winter right now…

Nevertheless, the point stands; your soil is better than ours here in Cali. Pick the town somewhere in the Golden State and drive through it; not a single retail storefront carries a brand name that is dedicated to this state. Not. One. People don’t understand the ramifications of this; it means that as we make this a more and more business-hostile part of the country, the businesses don’t even need to start thinking about “moving out.” There are no boxes to be packed or trucks to be loaded. All they have to do is make the decision not to do any expanding here…put their expansion dollars into Colorado or Nevada or Washington State or Florida. Easier than falling off a log.

Houston and Fort Worth at least get to enjoy the benefits of that. And, if the day ever comes people will renew their practical enthusiasm about business and semi-business applications again…managing their data in a customizable way, as they were compelled to do in the ’80s…unless something radical happens, the resulting boom will certainly locate its epicenter in and around Texas. It isn’t a business commodity that is staked down to any one geographic location — and there’s no business anywhere that’s going to pay double and triple the state payroll taxes, environmental impact fees, licensing fees, etc. etc. etc. just to get a pretty view of Golden Gate bridge. Well, maybe something in sales, something prestige-dependent. But not technology.

Besides of which, I still think of San Antonio as one of the most visually appealing U.S. locations I’ve ever visited. Wichita Falls would rank high on that list as well.
- mkfreeberg | 12/29/2010 @ 17:14
“Lots of Texas professionals love New York this way: fly in for $200 round trip, suck down the city’s beefy marrow of culture for a weekend and jet back to live cheap and pay no income tax. It’s all the pleasure and we keep our treasure.”

Actually you’ll be parting with quite a bit of that treasure for a weekend in New York. Airport taxes, $20 cocktails and $14 beers, oh and don’t forget that 18.5% hotel tax. No I am not making those numbers up.
- Duffy | 12/30/2010 @ 10:44
From one of the few states that didn’t “get it” in the 2010 elections (yours being the other, nyah nyah neaner neaner)…I hear ya, Rob. And yet, still the Texans visit — some of ’em. And I can see it.

I grew up by a bay, a real saltwater bay. Were in in the Great State o’ Texas, I probably wouldn’t spring for this weekend in NY…except for my better half’s parents still living there upstate…but I could see having to get out of dodge every now & then. That’s why I keep fixating on the part of the map that surrounds Galveston when I have this fantasy.

Hell’s bells, we’re splitting for our favorite ocean spot just a week from tomorrow. We just do the work-eat-screw-sleep thing inland for too many months, no hint of salty air anywhere, I just start getting all wonky. I do feel bad though for people who automatically think “Coney Island” when they think about taking a break; aside from the beating one takes in the pocketbook, it’s just a sign that one’s horizons need embiggening.
- mkfreeberg | 12/30/2010 @ 10:54

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Now That People Are Heading to Texas, What’s That Place Like Anyway?Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Now That People Are Heading to Texas, What’s That Place Like Anyway?
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010