Kevin Williamson:
The Paul Krugman–led chorus trying to discredit Texas’s economic model has been claiming that Texas relied more heavily than any other state on federal stimulus money to close its budget gap....
That 97 percent figure got retailed all over the place — CNN, Jon Chait at The New Republic, etc. But it is basically meaningless to say that “Texas was the state that depended most” on stimulus funds without taking into account the size of the gap covered. Texas’s was just $6.6 billion. For comparison, California’s deficit in 2009 was more than $26 billion.
The fact is that Texas, at $985 per capita, received less stimulus funding than almost any other state. (Virginia and Nebraska were lower.)
...
Most of the stimulus money went to states that supported Obama. He did very poorly in Texas and Nebraska, although he did win in Virginia. Krugman hates the success of the Texas model of low taxes and low government spending and is willing to cook the books to be critical of it. I think this is a dishonest way of making his case. Unfortunately many liberals were on board with him.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
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