As our lawmakers consider a plan to boost taxes by roughly a billion bucks, perhaps they would appreciate Kevin D. Williamson?s assessment in the latest print version of National Review of the characteristics that have helped Texas thrive:
Texans are building Bell helicopters and Lockheed Martin airplanes, Dell computers and TI semiconductors. Always keeping an eye on California, Texans have started bottling wine and making movies. And there?s still an automobile industry in America, but it?s not headquartered in Detroit: A couple thousand Texans are employed building Toyotas, and none of them is a UAW member.
There are those who would look at this and say, ?Not bad for a state with no income tax and a part-time legislature that meets only every two years.? And there are those who would say, ?You could only accomplish this in a state with no income tax and a part-time legislature that meets only every two years.? Texas?s formula for success is classical conservatism: Low spending enables low taxes, while a liberal regulatory environment attracts the capital that makes capitalism work. Texas has a state government that is structurally incapable of the grand political ambitions that characterize states such as California and New York, which leaves the private sector with a relatively open theater of operation. With conservatives at the national level looking to the states for models of what works, Texas can provide a blueprint for a prudent and bipartisan conservatism that is neither hostage to ideological excess nor relegated to merely tring to put Leviathan on a leash.
