On The Chris Salcedo Show, Daniel Miller laid out the Texas Nationalist Movement’s new fiscal case for independence: the eighth-largest economy on earth, roughly $68 billion a year sent to Washington and never returned, and a federal ledger the government itself is projecting into insolvency.
Daniel Miller, president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, joined Chris Salcedo on August 20 for an update on where the independence movement stands. Salcedo is a veteran conservative broadcaster with deep reach into Texas, heard on WBAP in Dallas-Fort Worth and KSEV in Houston and carried on stations around the country, and until this year a fixture on Newsmax. He gave Miller most of a half hour and worked down a slate of the movement’s own figures, one at a time.
The throughline was the movement’s new report, Can Texas Make It, released at the start of the month. Its first answer is the one opponents never expect. Texas is the eighth-largest economy on earth, ahead of Canada, Russia, and Australia, and more than 180 countries run their entire governments on less than Texas produces. “If we can’t,” Miller said of going it alone, “then who can?” The second answer is the balance sheet. By the report’s six-year look-back, which this time factored in federal debt and inflation, Texas overpays Washington by roughly $68 billion a year, money sent north and never returned. He called it a deliberately conservative read, compressed by the COVID-era money the federal government printed, and said the report exists in part to answer the old “taker state” claim head-on.
Miller spent as much time on Washington’s books as on Texas’s. The report leans on the federal government’s own numbers, a Treasury that calls the spending path unsustainable and projections that give the system roughly two decades before the math runs out. By the time he spoke, Miller noted, the federal debt had crossed $40 trillion, sooner than the report itself had projected. “The federal government is effectively projecting its own fiscal demise,” he said. “This is not Chris Salcedo saying it, or Daniel Miller saying it. This is their own analysis.”
Salcedo pressed on the practical objections, and Miller worked through them. On the exit bill, he said Texas is under no obligation to assume a share of a debt it did not run up. By precedent and international practice there is no automatic exit tax, the balance sheet gets negotiated, and by his accounting the floor for what Texas would owe runs to zero. On Social Security, he made two points. Leaving does not strip anyone’s citizenship, which federal law makes hard to revoke, and federal law already lets citizens draw benefits while living anywhere in the world. The sharper question, he added, is how long the program lasts at all, with the government projecting its trust funds insolvent in the first half of the 2030s.
The report’s hardest edge, Miller said, is generational. Texas skews younger than most of the country, so the young here carry more of that federal debt than almost anyone, paying into a system the government’s own accountants say will not hold. That, he argued, is why the movement frames the choice the way it does. “Texas is going to be independent by design or by default,” he said, and, he added, polling has long shown that if the question reaches a ballot, it passes. What is missing is the ballot itself, a concrete future date when Texans vote, under Article 1, Section 2 of the Texas Constitution, on whether the state should reassert its status as an independent nation.
He closed on a comparison that is getting harder to wave off. Alberta, Canada’s most conservative province, goes to the polls in October on its own independence question. The point is not that Texas should copy anyone, Miller said, but that a province the size of a country is about to do the ordinary thing the movement has asked Texas to do. Put it to a vote.
Salcedo’s is a conservative audience, and the case Miller made to it was not a partisan one. It was arithmetic: a solvent Texas tied to a partner going broke by its own count, and a young population left holding the difference. Miller has the arithmetic. What he still does not have is the ballot.
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