Texas Owes Economic Strength to Poorly Paid Dishwashers?

It sure seems like Rick Perry is going to throw his hat into the presidential race. If he does, he’ll point to the relative strength of the Texas economy, especially as the national news remains bad, as proof that he knows what it takes to get our nation back on financial track.

But an editorial by Bloomberg today says that Texas is where it is not just because of low taxes and relatively little regulation, as Perry would argue. Our state is blessed with a growing population, a young population, and low wages — factors that can’t be easily replicated:

In high-skill professions, such as management and petroleum engineering, Texas salaries often exceed national norms. For unskilled labor and service employees, austerity rules. The Texas Workforce Commission, a state agency, says hourly workers have earned 4 percent to 7 percent less than their counterparts nationwide for most of the last decade. For 2009, the U.S. Census Bureau placed Texas third among states in income inequality.

Dishwashers in Texas averaged $7.90 an hour in 2009, 10.3 percent below their peers nationwide. Texas sewing-machine operators made do with $9.35 an hour, 12.6 percent below the 50- state average. Some 9.5 percent of hourly workers subsist at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That leaves Texas tied with Mississippi for the largest share of the population earning no more than the minimum wage.

Texas’s wage gap “matters a lot” in fueling job growth, says Mark Dotzour, chief economist at Texas A&M’s Real Estate Center, an academic research group financed with real-estate license fees. As he explains it, companies are leaving higher- cost states and moving to places where they think their expenses will be lower. Texas is working that trend to its advantage, but this is hardly a formula that the other 49 states could, or should, copy.