the tindog coffeehouse

I hate Walmart. I detest it. I hate everything about it. I hate the parking lot. I hate that the medicine and toiletries section is on the complete opposite side of the store as everything else you need. I hate that even if you’re just running in for five things, you still have to get a full-size cart because you can never find a handbasket. I hate that they have 78 checkout lanes, but only two are open at any given time. And I hate that if you use the self-checkout lane, there’s a 99.9% chance something won’t work, and you’ll have to wait around for ten minutes for a worker to come by and enter a random code that you probably could’ve entered yourself.

And yet I still shop there.

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If it seems like just a few years ago that the Texas economy was booming, you’d be right. In fact, in 2006 Texas had a budget surplus of over $8 billion. So how is it that just five years later, we’re facing down the barrel of a $27 billion deficit?

Fort Worth Weekly explains that there are a few reasons. First came major changes to the state’s franchise tax in 2006 along with other taxes that were supposed to save local school districts about $7 billion in maintenance and operations taxes. However, the franchise tax didn’t bring in the revenue legislators expected it to.

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A couple of years ago, I quoted an article from The Economist comparing California, with its high unemployment and oppressive government regulation, to Texas, which has a lower-than-average unemployment rate and business-friendlier environment. While Texas naturally came out ahead, the article did praise California’s “inventive” nature, to which I replied, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

I may have to rethink that.

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Father’s Day may just be another holiday manufactured by the greeting card companies (and sponsored by Home Depot), but it could just be the key to ending poverty as we know it.

According to a new study by the Heritage Foundation, having a married father in the household “has the same effect in reducing poverty as adding five to six years to a parent’s education level”:

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Just in time for this year’s census, Radical Cartography has published a bunch of amazingly detailed (and beautiful) maps and charts from the census of 1870.

The data essentially reinforce what you would expect to find in the first census since the end of the Civil War: The North had a higher population overall, more foreign-born residents, much fewer African-Americans, and was much wealthier than the South. The percentage of men in the West (California, Nevada, Idaho, etc.) far exceeded the percentage of women. And the federal government, whose expenditures were almost completely limited to the military, saw the national debt explode in order to pay for the Civil War.

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Last month I pointed out how The Dallas Morning News told us that Texas had simultaneously both gained and lost jobs.

Now we get the sequel.

First, we find out that Texas employers hired 41,700 new employees in October (a number almost identical to the jobs lost a month before). But then in another article (also from the DMN), we find out that Dallas-Fort Worth “lost about 60,000 jobs in October compared to a year earlier.” Both stats, conveniently, come from the Texas Workforce Commission.

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