with its rolling tumbleweeds and two lane highway.

Guess the Romney team has never been to Houston or driven down I-35.

Dishonest to the core.

the MA unemployment rate under Romney was never 4.7%.

It was 6.1% when he took office and 5.4% when he left office.

Perry for the same time frame took unemployment from 7.% down to 4.8%. Romney is trying to compare apples to oranges.

If you want to really know someone, make them mad. That’s when the real person comes out.

Quotas are not conservative. They are an inept or intellectually lazy means of assessment. If people are not committing crimes, we shouldn’t arrest folks just to meet a quota. And when everyone has a job, we don’t need to prioritize job creation or criticize the leader for “failing to create jobs.”

At the end of Mitt Romney’s term as Governor, MA had a healthy unemployment rate of 4.7 (below 4 becomes unhealthy). There was no job problem, and no need for an artificial “fix.” When Romney took office, the state faced a massive budget problem, which Romney successfully solved.

So why does Rick Perry point out that Romney didn’t create many jobs? Because many people are confused. We are now in a jobs crisis, nationally, and people are thinking in terms of the need to create jobs.

The only way MA could have created more jobs under Romney is if the population in MA had increased. But MA is the third most densely populated state, right behind RI and NJ. Texas has 26 times the area of MA. That means, unlike MA, Texas has room for sprawl (which it has seen in excess) – meaning cheap land for people as well as businesses building stores and factories, equaling jobs.

Logistically, TX is a frontier. And because of its central placement, varied climate and sophisticated urban variety, it is a hub. Combine this with its conservative laws (pre-dating Rick Perry) and built-in natural resources, and Texas is an obvious place for people to move.

Still, as Mitt Romney pointed out, a much higher percentage of jobs were created in TX under both Richards and Bush than under Perry. This may indicate that suburban TX is finally beginning to see some saturation after the massive population increase of the last 20 years.

The bottom line is that Texas has had room for bringing in new people. MA population has seen little change in 20 years, while TX has had a 40% increase in population over that same period. While Perry would like to take credit for job growth, especially since the recession, recent growth has been demonstrably chaotic rather than ordered. Just as Babe Ruth hit more home runs than anyone else but also struck out more than anyone else, when people have taken their savings and moved to Texas in the last 3 years, they have naturally generated some jobs but also been left with a lot of unemployment.

To illustrate the chaos which Perry takes credit for, consider that a year ago MA and TX had the same unemployment rate, 8.2% (Sept. ’10). Now, MA is down to 7.6 and TX is up to 8.4. Is this the result of Perry’s careful planning and micromanagement? If so, he has failed. If not, he should stop pretending to assume credit for the jobs situation in Texas.

Texas has no state income tax, no capital gains tax, and no tax on corporate dividends. In contrast, California taxes all three. It has the highest state income tax rates in the nation, with a top rate of 10.3 percent and with most income earners paying 9.3 percent. The California sales tax stands at 8.25 percent. In Texas, the state sales tax rate is 6.25 percent. With both the highest personal income tax and the highest state sales tax in the nation, California also has the largest budget deficit of any state.

Texas has economically outperformed California by any measure. Since 1998, economic growth in Texas has been nearly 20 percent higher than it is in California. Since the end of the tech boom, the rate of real economic growth in Texas has been 48.5 percent higher than in California. From 1998 to 2007, personal income in Texas grew 21 percent faster than in California. Since 2002, real personal income has grown 46 percent faster in Texas. From 2000 to 2007, California lost a net of 1.2 million residents. Texas, over the same period, gained more than half a million in interstate migration, the third highest in the country.

Prior to 2003, Texas was losing doctors at an alarming rate due to predatory practices of trial lawyers who were driving up the cost of malpractice insurance. In 2003, the Texas legislature passed a measure to limit medical liability. In that same year, a state constitutional amendment was approved by voters to cap noneconomic damages awarded by juries. These two provisions reversed the trend and improved care, accessibility, and the overall economy by making Texas a more attractive place to live, work, and own a business. Malpractice claims dropped, and physician recruitment and retention went up. Doctors saved more than $50 million on insurance premiums, and hospitals’ insurance rates went down.

People in Texas, like anyone living in any state, have a choice. They can vote with their feet. Many living in California simply became fed up with their state’s high taxes and regulations. Many who moved out moved to Texas, where on average they are safer, freer, and more prosperous. Competition among the states is a powerful incentive for states to keep taxes and the cost of doing business low. And as this California versus Texas example shows, conservative economic policies work and socialist policies don’t.

Yet both the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress continue to ignore success stories like Texas. They are going in the opposite direction, passing a massive government takeover of health care while planning similarly massive tax increases to pay for it and for the rest of their job-killing agenda.

Now, it may not be surprising that a politician from Chicago would not naturally look to the Lone Star State for solutions. And you wouldn’t expect a Texas governor to look in Illinois for answers (thankfully).

And that is precisely the point of this book. States have been called laboratories in democracy precisely because every problem potentially has fifty different approaches to solving it. Some solutions work in some states and not in others. Some states prefer some solutions over others. Some solutions may work in every state, and some just don’t work at all. But the best way to find the best solutions is to allow the states to discover what works best for them, without the federal government interfering.

In today’ s global economy, each state is competing not only with other states for businesses, workers, and investors but also on a global level. The fact is, with the right principles and policies, you can make any place rich, as happened in Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, the opposite applies as well. With the wrong principles and the wrong policies, you can make any place poor, as happened in Detroit. In 1950, 1.8 million people called Detroit home. It ranked first in median income of all major cities in America. But after Detroit’s political leaders, ignoring the principles of freedom and free markets, governed with runaway government spending and taxes, Detroit shrank by more than half. Today, the Motor City is number 66 in median household income in a list of 68 major American cities. One-third of its residents are living below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate is the highest of any major metropolitan area in the country.

Like Father, Like Son??

George W. Romney
43rd Governor of Michigan
In office: January 1, 1963 – January 22, 1969

By 1967, a looming deficit prompted the legislature to overhaul Michigan’s tax structure. Personal and corporate state income taxes were created while business receipts and corporation franchise taxes were eliminated. Passage of an income levy had eluded past Michigan governors no matter the party in control of the legislature. Romney’s getting Democratic and Republican factions to compromise on the details of the measure was considered a key test of his political ability.

Romney greatly expanded the size of state government while governor. Romney’s first state budget in office came in at $550 million for fiscal year 1963, a $20 million increase over that of his predecessor Swainson. Romney had also inherited a $85 million budget deficit, but got the state to where it had a surplus. In the following fiscal years, the state budget increased to $684 million for 1964, $820 million for 1965, $1 billion for 1966, $1.1 billion for 1967, and was proposed as $1.3 billion for 1968. Romney led the way for a large increase in state spending on education, and Michigan began to develop one of the nation’s most comprehensive systems of higher education. There was a significant increase in funding support for local governments and there were generous benefits for the poor and unemployed. Romney’s spending was enabled by generally prosperous economic conditions that allowed continued government surpluses and by a consensus of both parties in Michigan to maintain and administer extensive state bureaucracies and to expand public sector services.

The qualities that helped Romney as an industry executive worked against him as a presidential candidate; he had difficulty being articulate, often speaking at length and too forthrightly on a topic and then later correcting himself while maintaining he was not. Reporter Jack Germond joked that he was going to add a single key on his typewriter that would print, “Romney later explained….” Life magazine wrote that Romney “manages to turn self-expression into a positive ordeal” and that he was no different in private: “nobody can sound more like the public George Romney than the real George Romney let loose to ramble, inevitably away from the point and toward some distant moral precept.”

The perception grew that Romney was gaffe-prone and an oaf; the campaign, beset by internal rivalries, soon went through the first of several reorganizations. By then, Nixon had already overtaken Romney in Gallup’s Republican preference poll, a lead he would hold throughout the rest of the campaign. The techniques that had brought Romney victories in Michigan, such as operating outside established partisan formulas and keeping a distance from Republican Party organizational elements, proved ineffective in a party nominating contest. Romney’s national poll ratings continued to erode, and by May he had lost his edge over Johnson. The Detroit riots of July 1967 did not change his standing among Republicans, but did give him a bounce in national polls against the increasingly unpopular president. A couple of months later, Romney staged a three-week, 17-city tour of the nation’s ghettos, seeking to engage militants and others in dialogue.

Questions were occasionally asked about Romney’s eligibility to run for President due to his birth in Mexico, given the ambiguity in the United States Constitution over the phrase “natural-born citizen”.

Two weeks before the March 12 primary, an internal poll showed Romney losing to Nixon by a six-to-one margin in New Hampshire. Rockefeller, seeing the poll result as well, publicly maintained his support for Romney but said he would be available for a draft; the statement made national headlines and embittered Romney (who would later claim it was Rockefeller’s entry, and not the “brainwashing” remark, that doomed him). Seeing his cause was hopeless, Romney announced his withdrawal as a presidential candidate on February 28, 1968. Romney wrote his son Mitt, still away on missionary work: “Your mother and I are not personally distressed. As a matter of fact, we are relieved. … I aspired, and though I achieved not, I am satisfied.”

Presidential historian Theodore H. White wrote that during his campaign Romney gave “the impression of an honest and decent man simply not cut out to be President of the United States.” Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio more memorably said, “Watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.”

Like Mitt, the Mexican Romneys are descendants of Miles Park Romney, who came to the Chihuahua desert in 1885 seeking refuge from U.S. anti-polygamy laws. He had four wives and 30 children, and on the rocky banks of the Piedras Verdes River, he and his fellow Mormon pioneers carved out a prosperous settlement beyond the reach of U.S. federal marshals. He was Mitt’s great-grandfather.

Gaskell Romney, Mitt’s grandfather, settled in Mexico as well, and Mitt’s father, George Romney, was born in nearby Colonia Dublan — raising the possibility of a 2012 presidential race between two contenders whose fathers were born outside the United States.

Politico reports this morning that the LA Times has delved into RomneyCare, signed into law in ’06. Mr. Romney supported the provision, “Health Safety Net” which was written to provide access to MA healthcare for not just the poor and uninsured, but extends to “undocumented immigrants” as well. Under the Health Safety Net in MA, uninsured undocumented immigrants can go to any healthcare facility and obtain healthcare services for virtually no cost, no matter their citizenship status.

States are required by the federal govt. to provide healthcare and education to children. Romney’s Health Safety Net was likely in response to a failure of the fed’s to secure the borders and enforce immigration laws. Hmmm……….sounds like Perry’s rationale for instate tuition for illegals.

One could no more assume that providing education is a ‘magnet’ to illegals than one could assume providing healthcare is a magnet. Both privileges could well be interpreted as a benefit to a family coming across the border.

It’s time for Gov. Romney to drop an argument he can’t win. He and Gov. Perry are far closer on this issue than he cares to admit. Both these candidates need to turn their wrath toward the Fed’s. It’s a situation that presidents and folks like Bachmann, Gingrich, Paul and Santorum that serve or served in Congress failed to do anything about for decades. It should not be an attack against fellow governors in this campaign.