Rick Perry’s ‘Texas Rocks’ Tour Heads to Maryland

Once and (perhaps) future presidential candidate Rick Perry has spent much of this year visiting states controlled by Democratic governors to troll for jobs. Now Perry is extending his 'Texas rocks' tour (okay, that's my name for it) to Maryland, accompanied by radio ads urging the state's businesses to flee high taxes "squeezing every dime" out of their profits, and come to Texas instead. 

So far Perry has taken a similar campaign to California, Illinois, and New York, in the process eliciting some snarky rejoinders to his ads from local politicians like Jerry Brown. Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley joined the fray, calling Perry "all hat and no cattle," a phrase with which we were previously unfamiliar. 

Maryland's newspapers have joined in the fracas, (as have papers in other states), with the Baltimore Sun opining in an editorial that the Texas economic miracle is fine "if you fancy working for low wages." That's a common criticism of Perry, but one that's at odds with the facts. 

As demographer Wendell Cox demonstrated in this City Journal story earlier this year, Texas hasn't just been creating jobs faster than most other places. It has been creating high-paying jobs. 

Yes it's true that Texas generates lots of jobs in lower-wage industries like food service, hotel accommodations and administration. Any time an area's population is growing the way Texas' is, those jobs grow rapidly. 

But from 2002 through 2011, Cox explains, Texas also created 216,000 jobs paying 150 percent or more than the national average wage. The rest of the country created just 495,000 of those jobs in the same period. 

In that period, Texas added 128,000 professional, scientific and technical jobs. In fact, Texas has emerged as a major center of scientific research and study. It ranked second in the country in the amount of R&D research its institutions attracted, some $18 billion, according to calculations from ResearchAmer!ca based on National Science Foundation data from 2012. By contrast, Maryland attracted $15.6 billion. And most of the research money heading to Maryland is from federal government sources, unlike Texas.

Indeed, more and more of those good paying jobs in Maryland that the Baltimore Sun crows about are a result of an expanding federal government, as firms that do business with Washington increasingly move to the greater Beltway area to avail themselves of federal dollars. Even as aerospace and other defense industries have shrunk in places like California and New York, they are a burgeoning sector in Maryland thanks to relocations. 

Of course that suggests that Perry may be barking up the wrong tree in Maryland. While there's solid evidence that California firms have indeed been looking more favorably on the Lone Star State (see this Wendell Cox study), the Maryland "miracle' outlined by the Baltimore Sun of high paying private-sector jobs is driven increasingly by money the federal government lobs into Maryland. Texas' low taxes can't overcome the proximity disadvantage.

According to a study last year by the business site 24/7 Wall St., Maryland received the third highest benefits among the states in federal dollars spent there, including salaries of public workers and federal contracting dollars. Federal taxes sent by Maryland residents to Washington averaged $2,950 per resident, whereas Washington spending in the state is a robust $16,673 per resident. As the study observed, "most of the 10 states with the highest federal spending per capita had a higher median household income than the United States average." No kidding. 

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