Liberals, stop your snickering -- we actually need Texas

Based on the 80,000-plus signatures from Texans on petitions seeking to secede from the union, liberals far and wide are snickering: “Let all those right-wing rednecks leave. The country would be better off.”

But writer Chuck Thompson makes a good case for the oft-heard warning: “Don’t mess with Texas.”

In a humorous piece written for The New Republic, Thompson, who wrote a book about the South’s continuous flirtation with the idea of secession, gets serious when laying out the Lone Star State’s ability to become the Independent Republic of Texas.

For those of us in Michigan, a state still struggling to shake free of a decade-long recession, Thompson’s overview is a bit sobering:

“... It’s not just that the state leads the nation in production of most of those aforementioned resources (oil, natural gas, cattle, cotton). With a rock-solid infrastructure (Texas is the only state in the continental U.S. with its own independent power grid) and stable political tradition, it’s also a self-sustaining player in agriculture, aeronautics, computers, energy, high-tech research and manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation and just about any other economic category to which you care to attach a dollar value.

“It’s home to six of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips and AT&T, not to mention Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and Dr Pepper. According to a 2011 Economist ranking, Texas’s $1.224 trillion GDP makes it the economic equivalent of Russia -- and the fourteenth-largest economy in the world, second among U.S. states only to California.

“Even during the recent economic downturn, commerce in Texas has remained robust. Employment is growing at 3.1 percent annually; its manufacturing and export figures are trending up; its unemployment rate currently stands at 6.8 percent, a full point below the national average; and housing starts are up 17.2 percent over the past year.

“Texan Bob Smiley, author of the witty Texas secession novel Don’t Mess With Travis (Travis being the surname of a fictional Texas governor who calls for secession), is even more emphatic on the point. ‘In the last decade of the Great Recession, Texas has expanded by more than one million jobs, more than all other states combined,’ Smiley told me in an email. ‘And fully 95 percent of the country receives its oil and gas courtesy of pipelines that originate within Texas. That is what one might call leverage.’”