Even Haters of Pro-Right to Work Lone Star State Governor Admit the ‘Texas Model’ Is Working

Since the beginning of this year, proudly pro-Right to Work Lone Star State GOP Gov. Rick Perry has visited two of the biggest forced-unionism strongholds in the country, California and Illinois, to urge business leaders to “pack up and move to Texas,” as Fred Barnes puts it in a new report for The Weekly Standard (see the link below).

Perry has publicly stated time and again that Texas’s Right to Work statute prohibiting the termination of employees for refusal to join or pay dues to an unwanted union is one of a handful of important reasons why the state is so attractive to employees and business owners across the country who are considering relocation.

And even some of Perry’s biggest detractors are willing to concede he’s right about Texas’s economic success.  In 2012, for example, the Democrat Party-allied Texas Monthly went so far as to give Perry its “Bum Steer of the Year” award.  But, as Barnes points out, regular Texas Monthly writer Erica Grieder has just published a book acknowledging, by her own account, that Perry and other like-minded politicians are “right to defend the Texas model.”  Grieder elaborates:  The data are “pretty hard to deny; either the model’s been working or it’s a h*** of a coincidence.”

According to Barnes, Grieder’s book “knocks down many of the liberal [and specifically Big Labor] complaints about the Texas boom”:

The new jobs are mainly low-paying? From 2001 to 2011, “fully 45 percent were in the upper-middle and upper quartiles.” The state’s dependent on the federal government? In the 1990s and 2000s, “Texas was one of the handful of states that sent more money to Washington than it received in return.”

Barnstorming for Jobs and Growth