True Dat

In some left-leaning circles, Texas is more of a punchline than an actual place. Democrats in places like New York and California look proudly at their environmental policies and social safety net and cringe at the thought of living in some unspeakably sordid place like Texas or "the South."

And yet, while New York and California have multi-billion dollar budget deficits, Texas doesn't.

This NYT piece by Ross Douthat's is worth a look , especially if any of you are fans of limited government.

Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

Its a good piece. Read the whole thing.