Did Rick Perry Sink the Texas Economy? (Corrected Version)

Sorry, folks I made a very bad mistake on this one. (Lesson: always double-check your commands in an Excel spreadsheet.) It turns out that Texas maintained and actually increased the gap between its rate of job growth and the rest of the country during the Perry years.

Over the years from 1987 to 2001, annual job growth in Texas averaged 2.8 percent. This is 0.8 percentage points higher than the growth rate for the economy as a whole. In the ten years since Governor Perry took office job...