[BretLudwig]

VDA We Still Have Karl Rove to Kick Around Some More

"Here's an excerpt in which I uncharacteristically show some sympathy
for Karl Rove and George Bush from my new VDARE.com column:

Its important to fully understand why the lessons the two Texans,
Rove and Bush, learned in their home state didnt apply in other heavily
Hispanic states.

So far, the mortgage meltdown hasnt been as bad in Texas as in the
four €œSand States€� (as they were known on Wall Street during the
Bubble): California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. These are home to half
of the foreclosures and a large majority of the defaulted mortgage money.

Partly this is due to the Oil Bubble, which now appears to be ending.
Oil prices over $100 per barrel kept the Texas economy strong in 2008,
allowing debtors to avoid foreclosure.

Also, the enormous amount of land and the lack of environmental
restrictions on home development in Texas means that when the federal
government stimulates demand, the supply of housing increases quickly as
well, keeping housing prices reasonable.

Finally, what Rove and Bush missed was how different was Texas's
economic and immigration history over the last three decades relative to
the seemingly similar Sand States. Due to OPECs oil price increases in
the 1970s, Texas experienced a huge construction boom thirty years ago.
That mostly attracted construction workers from the rest of the U.S.
rather than from Mexico, because Mexico was simultaneously experiencing
its own oil boom following massive new discoveries.

When oil prices collapsed in 1982, the economies of Texas and Mexico
slumped simultaneously. The big wave of post-1982 unemployed illegal
aliens therefore headed for California rather than for Texas.

Thats why San Antonio had "surprisingly low levels" of immigration
from 1965 to 2000, according to the important new book quantitatively
comparing Mexican-Americans in San Antonio and Los Angeles in 1965 and
2000, Generations of Exclusion, by sociologists associated with the UCLA
Chicano Studies Program.

The 2000 Census found that Californias foreign-born population (26
percent of all residents) was almost twice as large as Texass (14
percent).

As Texans, Rove and Bush apparently just couldnt understand the
quantity and quality of the immigration situation in the other heavily
Hispanic states. In 2000, Texas had a large but fairly well-rooted,
stable, and assimilated Mexican-American population that had a reasonable
potential to make enough money in resource-extraction or other blue-collar
jobs to afford to buy Texass cheap houses.

In sharp contrast, California had a huge and mostly new, ill-educated,
and unassimilated Mexican-American population that didnt have even a
chance of making enough money in Silicon Valley or Hollywood to afford
Californias already expensive houses.

And Nevada, Arizona, and Florida were more like California than they
were like Texas. [More]

So, who are the bad guys he Texans or Californians? That's what people
always want to know: who's the bad guy and who is the good guy?

The point is that our country's two biggest states are just very
different, and much of that has its roots in their very different
terrain.

For example, everybody in California would prefer to live near the Pacific
because the climate and scenery are so nice. In contrast, in Texas (and the
other Gulf of Mexico coastal states), the threat of hurricanes means people
tend to prefer to live inland. Galveston used to be the dominant port of
Texas's coast, until the hurricane of 1900 drowned 6000 people, after
which Houston (45 miles inland and 45 feet above sea level) became the
main metropolis. So, Affordable Family Formation works better in Texas
than in California.
This doesn't make Texans or Californians good or evil, it just makes them
different. And because the two states between them account for 60 million
people, it's crucial that Americans get a better grip on the differences
between the two states."



http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/11/v...e-to-kick.html
http://vdare.com/sailer/081116_rove.htm

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