California Can’t Mess with Texas
https://www.houstoncourant.com/editorial...4b3whcbjy65kgvg
May 28
Written By Bradley Vasoli

California’s reputation began sinking well before COVID-19 restrictions hastened the descent. Homelessness has soared; cost of living has squeezed even many middle-income earners; taxes have towered above those of other states, with lawmakers now threatening to raise them higher; and crime has risen. Last month, Chief Executive magazine ranked California the least business-friendly state.

For eight years now, these phenomena have spurred emigration. The exodus from the Golden State has perturbed the left for the bad light in which it casts progressive domestic policy, but also the right for the impact California’s departees stand to exert on their new, often more conservative, states. As Kristin B. Tate warns in The Liberal Invasion of Red State America, “The seismic shift of Democrats moving to purple and red states will likely lead to painful surprises for Republicans—including the likelihood that Texas and Georgia will be swing states in the 2020s or 2030s.” Even so, California will lose political clout over the next decade in the form of a congressional seat. (Population determines congressional apportionment.)

All the negative attention California has drawn has goaded some central-planning devotees into damage-control mode, using Texas as a foil. Their argument is threefold: Californians aren’t really moving to Texas in staggering numbers, California doesn’t overtax middle-class residents in comparison with Texas, and the mostly free-market model followed by Texas and rejected by California doesn’t work anyway. None of these contentions hold up to scrutiny.

Ball State University economics professor Michael J. Hicks expresses the first of the three in a recent MarketWatch op-ed. In 2019, he observes, merely 0.2 percent of Californians moved to Texas, while 0.12 percent of Texans departed for California. Hicks remarks that the data show “hardly a notable exodus.” Never mind that the numbers demonstrate that Californians were moving to Texas pre-COVID at almost twice the rate that Texans were doing the reverse. A better measure of these states’ respective success is nationwide domestic migration—the Lone Star State has received well over 500,000 new residents from other states per year over the last decade. In 2019, Texas saw a total domestic in-migration of 559,661 while California saw a total of 480,204. -- excerpt, rest at link above --