For eleven years the Texas Nationalist Movement has answered the same taunt, and this week it answered it again, at length. Can Texas make it on its own? The movement’s new report, “Can Texas Make It?”, runs 46 pages and cites almost nothing but the federal government’s own tables. The short version is that Texas is not the one who should be worried.
Start where the report starts, with what leaves Texans’ pockets. Texans send Washington and Austin about 453 billion dollars a year in taxes, drawn from IRS collections and the state comptroller’s books. Running every government those dollars buy at the federal and state level inside Texas, the defense, the courts, the agencies, the border stations, the state’s own budget, costs about 295 billion. The gap is roughly 158 billion dollars a year. The report will not call it a surplus, and it is careful about why. Net the shared retirement programs out of both columns and the margin tightens. What does not change is the direction. In every year the report examines, the pandemic included, Texas raised more than its own government cost.
Then there is the old charge that Texas is a taker. The report takes it apart. Strip the borrowed money out of the federal ledger, it finds, and Texas turns into a net creditor to Washington, about 68 billion dollars a year, behind only California and New York. The reason Texas can be made to look subsidized is a piece of arithmetic Washington would rather not explain. It spends about a dollar thirty-seven for every dollar it collects, and borrows the rest, which floats nearly every state up onto the same tide of debt.
The scale should have ended the argument years ago. By output, Texas is the eighth-largest economy on Earth. Bigger than Russia. Bigger than Canada. More than 180 countries run a whole national government on less than Texas produces in a year. “Too small to make it” was never a serious claim. It was a reflex.
Most of the document is spent burying the warnings independence skeptics raise. The exit bill Texas is told it would owe on the way out? The report puts the floor at zero, and points out that no treaty fixes the figure, that the estimates scholars offer run from trillions of dollars down to nothing, and that the Pentagon, which has never once passed an audit, cannot even price the bases it would owe Texas back. Social Security? A retiree’s check follows her to Florida, and it would follow her to Portugal, and Texas’s young workers already pay more into the system than the state’s retirees draw out.
The hardest numbers in the report are not about Texas at all. They are about the books Texas is chained to. The report quotes the Treasury’s own auditors, who describe the federal path in one word: unsustainable. Moody’s, Fitch, and Standard and Poor’s have each stripped the United States of its top credit rating. The University of Pennsylvania’s budget model gives Washington roughly twenty years before no tax increase and no spending cut can undo the damage. The debt crosses forty trillion dollars this October, weeks before Texans vote in November, and about a hundred thousand of those dollars now ride on every young Texan just starting out, run up in a name that never cast a ballot on any of it.
That is the point the movement has pressed for two decades, and now it has a spreadsheet behind it. Texans do not vote on the federal budget. They cannot fire the Federal Reserve. And the debt keeps stacking up under their children’s names whether they consent to it or not. Every figure in the ledger was set a thousand miles away, by a government Texans do not run. The quarrel the report picks is not that Washington drives a hard bargain with Texas. It is that Texas was never at the table where the bargain was struck.
The whole thing is posted at cantexasmakeit.com, every figure printed next to the government source it came from. The pitch is almost a dare. Do not trust the Texas Nationalist Movement, it says, trust the IRS, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve, and run the numbers yourself. Most of the movement’s critics will not, which is rather the point.
So the question the report leaves is not whether Texas can afford to govern itself. On these numbers it is already paying for the privilege, and covering Washington’s overdraft on top of it. The question is how much longer a solvent Texas keeps its money in a house its own creditors have started to back away from.
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