Bigger In Texas

Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry is still kicking around a run for President, but his supporters say he'll win based on Texas's record of job creation in a bad economy.  But if I were Rick Perry, I'd be running as far away from my "job creation" record as possible.  TP has the goods:

Additionally, Texas has by far the largest number of employees working at or below the federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour in 2010) compared to any state, according to a BLS report. In 2010, about 550,000 Texans were working at or below minimum wage, or about 9.5 percent of all workers paid by the hour in the state. Texas tied with Mississippi for the greatest percentage of minimum wage workers…From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers in Texas rose from 221,000 to 550,000, an increase of nearly 150 percent.

That's Rick Perry's legacy right now:  Texas has one of the lowest median wages in the country, tied for highest percentage of minimum wage workers, and flat out blows the rest of the country away with more than a half a million minimum wage jobs.  These are the jobs that Rick Perry's economic boom created:  people earning less than $15,000 a year and expected to support a family on it.

Now Rick Perry wants to bring that to the rest of the country.  Texas has about as many minimum wage workers as Wyoming has people.  In fact, in the last four years, Perry has more than doubled the minimum wage jobs in the state, far and away the majority of new jobs in the "Texas job boom" are people making $7.25 an hour.

I still say Perry's going nowhere.