A reader writes:
There are two factors that your post seems to miss that should play into any discussion of the minimum wage data on Texas, and broader discussions of whether Texan economic policy is a success or a failure (for the record, I'm an nth generation Texan who likes this state but doesn't much care for its political leadership).
1. Texas' minimum wage is pegged to the Federal minimum wage.
This means that the reader's comparison to California, where the minimum wage is substantially higher than the Federal minimum wage (it's $8.00/hour), is pretty much irrelevant to a discussion of whether Texas is an economic policy success. California has a ton of workers making California minimum wage – it's just that all of those workers don't get folded into the BLS statistics because they're not making the Federal minimum wage. So comparative minimum wage figures are irrelevant if they don't take into account those sorts of state-by-state minimum wage variations. And if you really want to get into it, my bet would be that in purchasing power parity terms, those Texans making the Federal minimum wage are better off than the Californians making an extra $.75/hr are.
2. As another reader pointed out, any discussion of income distribution in Texas just has to account for the fact that we are the nation's preeminent border-hopping locale. Of course there's going to be a big chunk of bottom-end wage earners in Texas! We share a very permeable border with Mexico! Which is not to say anything substantive about the immigration issue – hell, I am and will remain pro-illegal immigration up to the day when we pass a near-open border policy – but it's a deeply relevant aspect of any discussion of the Texas economy with reference to distributional issues. We've got another continent's poor people bangin' around down here! (And more power to 'em! I've found the dubiously documented folks that I've spent time with to be uniformly upstanding, hardworking, honest, and kind.)
Another writes:
Yglesias has a great post about why Texas has fared so much better: housing construction!
Obviously the oil and gas industries helps, but when the construction industry is not destroyed by not building houses, everyone fares better. I work in the Massachusetts Legislature and as a strong union supporter, hearing from the trade unions who are out of work at clips of 20%, when I know sprinkler fitters who haven't worked in over a year and a half, it makes you realize what a drag that is on the state economy. Massachusetts has done better because it has a strong base in the colleges/universities/life sciences/some finance, but imagine what we could be doing if we didn't have such draconian zoning rules. Yglesias' post has a graph that shows just how few houses are being built in the Boston area. While Greater Boston is pretty much very developed under current zoning rules, Texas can just continue to sprawl like crazy.
However, I would caution saying that Texas is in such great shape because as gas prices continue their inevitable rise, two-hour commutes to and from the suburbs just won't be feasible.
The Dish 