Truth About Rick Perry's 'Texas Miracle'

Texas Governor Rick Perry has been on a Bernanke-bashing binge this week, demanding on Wednesday that the Federal Reserve "open their books up."
That comment comes after Perry said earlier this week that it would be "treasonous" if Chairman Ben Bernanke used Fed policy to stimulate the economy before the election.


But what books exactly does Perry want opened?
The Federal Reserve already publishes its balance sheet online every Thursday for the entire world to see.
Not only that, it is audited regularly. Every year, an external accounting firm audits the financial statements of the Federal Reserve and all 12 of its regional banks. Last year, that firm was Deloitte and Touche, but PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG have also done it over the years.
Those financial statements are also posted online.
"Every aspect of the Fed's financial dealings are wide open -- wide open," Bernanke remarked at the National Press Club in February. "There is no sense in which the Fed has secret financial dealings."
Despite that public information, anti-Fed criticism seems to be the latest craze on the Republican campaign trail. On Tuesday, Rep. Michelle Bachmann criticized the Federal Reserve for not being "subject to transparency."
Those comments echo similar sentiments from Rep. Ron Paul, a renowned Fed critic in his own right, who over the years has repeatedly called for audits of the central bank and even a review of all the gold in Fort Knox. Paul introduced a bill in the House earlier this year, called the "Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2011.


The Lone Star State is rich in natural resources such as oil and natural gas, so when the rest of the country was struggling with high energy prices at the onset of the recession, Texas companies were turning big profits and, therefore, pumping tax revenue into the state coffers.


These high energy profits helped Texas stave off the brunt of the recession for about six months.


And while the state's economy is growing at twice the national rate, so is its population. Texas grew 20.6 percent from 2000 to 2011, while the country's population only increased by 9.7 percent. With more people comes more purchasing power, which leads to job growth.


Regardless of whether Perry can personally take credit for the jobs created, critics claim the numbers are just smoke and mirrors because the new jobs are primarily low-wage.


"What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote Sunday. "What you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment."


Texas is tied with Mississippi for having the highest proportion of hourly workers earning minimum wage or less, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Overall, Texans earned about $2,300 less than the national average, according to 2009 Census Bureau data.


These low-paying jobs usually do not come with health insurance, which is part of the reason why Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the country. One of every four Texans lives without health insurance.


Depending on which measure is used, the jobs picture in Texas can be painted in radically different ways. On one hand, more Texans are getting a paycheck, on average, than in any other state. But on the other hand, those paychecks are more often from low-wage jobs without insurance in a state that has fewer social benefits than most others.


"People focus on the wage and, yeah, that's important, people need to support their families," said Lisa Givens, a spokeswoman for the Texas Workforce Commission. "But sometimes it's about looking down the road, looking at an area where there are going to be opportunities for me and for my family and for growth.

Perry's new stand on HPV vaccine

Gov. Rick Perry has taken flak for his 2007 attempt to require girls to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, the most commonly sexually transmitted disease and the principal cause of cervical cancer. At the risk of angering fellow conservatives, Perry has always insisted he did the right thing.

That unapologetic approach changed this weekend.

A few hours after unveiling his campaign for president, Perry began walking back from one of the most controversial decisions of his more-than-10-year reign as Texas governor. Speaking to voters at a backyard party in New Hampshire, Perry said he was ill-informed when he issued his executive order, in February 2007, mandating the HPV vaccine for all girls entering sixth grade, unless their parents completed a conscientious-objection affidavit form. The vaccine, Merck & Co.’s Gardasil, would have protected against the forms of HPV that cause about 70 percent of all cervical cancer, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.

"I signed an executive order that allowed for an opt-out, but the fact of the matter is that I didn’t do my research well enough to understand that we needed to have a substantial conversation with our citizenry," Perry said at the Manchester, N.H., event in response to an audience question about the HPV controversy, according to ABC News’ The Note. "But here’s what I learned: When you get too far out in front of the parade, they will let you know, and that’s exactly what our Legislature did, and I saluted it and I said, 'Roger that, I hear you loud and clear.' And they didn’t want to do it and we don’t, so enough said.”

Instead of making the vaccine mandatory, "what we should of done was a program that frankly allowed them to opt in or some type of program like that," Perry told the New Hampshire gathering.

With Perry’s declaration Saturday that he is entering the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, his lengthy record — Perry has been an elected official for almost 26 years — will come under intense new scrutiny. As the longest-serving governor in the country and the longest ever in Texas, Perry has a substantial history of political activity and has taken positions on a host of potentially controversial issues.

The new comments about the HPV decision amount to an acknowledgment that Perry has to deal early with controversies that could otherwise dog him in his primary fight against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party darling who is running strong in first-test Iowa, and Mitt Romney, a well-funded candidate with strong establishment backing and the ex-governor of New Hampshire’s neighbor, Massachusetts.

In recent weeks Perry has also sought to clarify his 10th Amendment-friendly statements on other hot-button issues. A few weeks before jumping into the race, Perry said in Aspen, Colo., that gay marriage should be left up to the individual states. Gay marriage in New York?

“That’s their business,” Perry said. Later, in Houston, Perry said he would allow states to set abortion policy if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned some day as he hopes.

The statements prompted criticism among Christian conservatives. Perry also took a pounding from former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a struggling GOP presidential candidate and social conservative, who criticized his laissez-faire approach. Perry has since begun stressing the need for federal constitutional bans on both gay marriage and abortion.

The governor had come under sharp criticism immediately after issuing the executive order on Feb. 2, 2007, to make the HPV vaccine mandatory. The conservative Eagle Forum and top Republicans in the Legislature were caught off guard and, in the words of one of them, “stunned” after Perry used an executive order to make the vaccine mandatory. Many lawmakers accused the governor of usurping parental rights and said the vaccine would encourage girls to be sexually promiscuous. At the time, Perry rejected their arguments.

With that in mind, the Texas Tribune's Jay Root does a deeper dive on Perry's comments at last weekend's New Hampshire house party about a controversial decision he made as governor that could ring poorly with conservatives - a mandatory vaccination for girls to prevent the HPV virus.

What he said Saturday was, "I signed an executive order that allowed for an opt-out, but the fact of the matter is that I didn’t do my research well enough to understand that we needed to have a substantial conversation with our citizenry. But here’s what I learned: When you get too far out in front of the parade, they will let you know, and that’s exactly what our Legislature did, and I saluted it and I said, 'Roger that, I hear you loud and clear.' And they didn’t want to do it and we don’t.