Yes, Virgina, the Recovery Act Worked Best in Texas
... even though the unemployment rate did rise to 8.3%.
Jared Bernstein:
Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47% of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas.... [T]he state lost only 53,000 jobs. But looming behind that number are large losses in the private sector (down 178,000) and large gains (up 125,000) in government jobs. Gov Perry has a funny way of going about that “inconsequential” thing. According to many news accounts from back in the Recovery Act days:
Turns out Texas was the state that depended the most on those very stimulus funds to plug nearly 97% of its shortfall for fiscal 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Now, I’ve got no problem with a state government using Recovery Act funds to retain or create jobs. In fact, the figure and quote above shows Texas to be following a traditional Keynesian game plan: as the private sector contracts, turn to the public sector to temporarily make up part of the difference...
