A viewer named Charles opened the night with a list of worries about an independent Texas economy: companies headquartered here leaving to keep the protections of the U.S. government, millions of jobs going with them, and tariffs on every Texas export. Miller took the premises one at a time. Texas is the eighth largest economy in the world today. Nations that separate typically take at worst about a 10 percent hit to GDP and need about a decade to recover, and he argues a deliberate, planned separation keeps that shock minimal. Get the federal government out of the way and he calls a fourth or fifth place ranking highly probable. As for protections, corporations are creations of the state, not the federal government. What Washington adds is red tape and taxes. He pointed to the Brexit remainers, who predicted a corporate exodus from the UK, and said companies moved the other direction. Nobody packs a Valero refinery into a U-Haul for Oklahoma, and if Washington imposed tariffs, Texas would trade with the rest of the world.
Most of the live questions were about New Mexico. Border counties there pushed during the last New Mexico legislative session to leave Santa Fe and join Texas, and Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows made it an interim charge, with a House hearing set for later this month. TNM will submit testimony, and an action alert is coming. Miller compared it to the Greater Idaho movement and to the urban-rural divide he expects to define the next political fight. But he was blunt about the law. The people created the state, and the state created the counties as administrative subdivisions. New Mexico would have to cede the territory and Texas would have to accept it, by agreement or by purchase. Congress has no say, he argues, because the states created the union. A county voting itself out would be breaking up a sovereign state, a different act entirely from Texas withdrawing its membership from a union it joined. The payoff comes next session with the Texas Independence Referendum Act. If Texas leaders will champion a vote for those counties, why not a vote for Texans?
The last segment went to Donald Trump’s promise, made on stage at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, of a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen. Miller played it alongside earlier promises of dividends and DOGE savings checks and called it about as socialist as it gets. The federal government is more than $40 trillion in debt and now pays more in interest than the entire defense budget, so the money would have to be borrowed or printed. His household version: someone takes a credit card out of your wallet, pulls a $5,000 cash advance, and hands you the cash and the bill, with interest. Whatever you do not pay off, your children inherit.
Questions answered in this episode
- If U.S. companies headquartered in Texas, like AT&T, McKesson, Tesla and Valero, left after independence and tariffs were imposed on Texas exports, how would an independent Texas remain economically strong and viable?
- What’s the deal with New Mexico wanting back in, and how should we think about adjacent counties in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Louisiana that might want to be annexed by Texas?
- What do you make of Trump’s promise of $5,000 for every adult?
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