Lone Star Nation by Richard Parker

Author:Richard Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus

Perryman was right about the economy. Texas is a big, highly diversified and urbanized economy. The drought would do powerful damage but alone could not stop the economy’s growth. But Perryman wasn’t quite right when it came to the prospect of drought in the future. It can, indeed it likely will, get decidedly worse.

The drought’s economic effect collided at the time with another largely overlooked problem: Increasing unemployment. Perry, campaigning for the presidency that year, liked to tell the story about how Texas created more jobs during the Great Recession than any other state; a fine and true story, in fact, though some smaller states saw employment rise at faster rates. But in late 2011, as the drought’s vengeance was fully felt, unemployment in Texas approached the national average—fast. The unemployment rate stood at 8.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The last time that unemployment was higher in Texas was November, 1986, when a historic bust in oil prices collided with the aftershocks of the Savings and Loan Crisis to turn downtowns into ghost towns. It was pretty simple. The Texas economy was connected to the global economy, just as the landscape was connected to the global climate, and climate change.

Now, 20 years later, state and local governments were adding to unemployment in cities and towns alike, dampening the Texas boom. Facing a $27 billion shortfall—and being caught with just $9 billion in the bank, the state’s so-called “rainy day” fund—the legislature and the governor in Austin simply slashed every facet of the budget. State agencies quickly dropped thousands of employees from the payroll—over 1,700 from the state prison systems alone.

The cuts then ripped through cities and school districts. Estimates from the state’s school districts suggested that as many as 100,000 teachers could be laid off when it was all said and done. It was not exactly a prudent display of financial planning in Austin, especially given the foreknowledge of a national recession that had begun nearly two years earlier.

Of course, Texas escaped the worst of the Great Recession with fewer scars than most places. Texas was prone to the caprices of global forces, increasingly those that were manmade. As more than $2 trillion in mutual funds were wiped out, 4.5 million homes went into foreclosure and 6.8 million jobs were lost by late 2011, the effect could be felt even in my small town. A merchant in the town square confided that he couldn’t take another year like the last two. A Mexican stonemason told me that a single project sustained his family through the winter. A realtor relayed that all over town, people who never took a mortgage they couldn’t afford were looking to give up, sell out, and move on.

The alternative was grimly tallied and cataloged at the stately 102-year old, brick-and-limestone county courthouse over in San Marcos. Jack Hays, for whom this county was named, was a living legend for his exploits as a Texas Ranger, namely for fighting the Comanche. Now, people were losing their homes not to raiding parties but to banks.

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