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Comment by avty | Hacker News Reader

Texas is another one. Created more jobs than all 49 other states combined.

Actually, majority of other state lost jobs.

Unfortunately, the majority of those jobs are minimum wage jobs: http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/12/news/economy/perry_texas_job...

Don't forget that those minimum-wage workers pay one of the highest state/local tax rates in the nation for their income level: Texas taxes its poorest quintile 12.6% of their meagre incomes through its various taxes, the 6th-highest rate in the nation. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/09/21/th...

Still, even after taxes, a minimum wage salary probably goes a lot farther in Texas than in a place like NYC or SF, where the cost of living is much higher. And having even a minimum wage job puts you a lot closer to getting a higher-paid job than being on welfare, since it gives you a work history and references.

That's why I've never been a fan of sales taxes over income taxes. Texas, and the other states listed in that piece, don't have an income tax but instead rely on a sales tax and excise taxes (alcohol, tobacco, and gas) for revenues, which are all very regressive.

Just add a basic income, and it balances out, again.

But an income tax is seen as a creeping evil, perpetually siphoning money away from the pockets of the citizens who worked and toiled for that hard-earned dollar. Instead, a sales tax fits more with the public's idea of a "fair" tax because it's like a "user fee," you only pay it if you use it. Don't want to pay sales tax? Easy, have Internet access and dodge it by ordering online, or just don't buy something. Don't want to pay income tax? Die.

As someone who grew up in Texas, now lives in NY, just from my observations, I think the lower-middle classes live far better and seem to be less marginalized than they are in the NY area. Home ownership is very much a possibility even on a $30k income near the population centers of Texas.

Of course, this is just a personal observation.

Due to a huge population influx for an already large state. Absolute numbers are generally a bad way to measure.

Most of those are from non-US migration as well (as the article indicates)

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3739

If it's true that the majority of other states lost jobs (as the parent comment claims), then Texas would have also created more jobs per capita than most other states (since a positive number, no matter how small, is greater than any negative number).

> ... since a positive number, no matter how small, is greater than any negative number ...

Strictly speaking, not "greater", which is an absolute measure, but more positive. -1 is absolutely greater than +1/2, but +1/2 is more positive than -1. Magnitudes don't have signs.

That seems an odd definition of "greater"; why do you say it's an absolute measure?

I'm no mathematician, but at least Mathematica disagrees with you (Greater[-1,1/2] returns False).

Consider a polar vector, which possesses a magnitude and one or more angles. For such a vector, the magnitude is always positive, on the basis that it is defined this way when shaped from Cartesian elements:

m = sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2 ...)

In this convention, for any given value of m, the signs of the individual components are lost in the conversion, which means when discussing magnitude, only the absolute value of m matters.

But, because Mathematica has a "Greater[]" function, and because that function simultaneously uses the word I chose and pays attention to scalar signs, I must be wrong about this.

> That seems an odd definition of "greater" ...

I respect the people behind Mathematica, so I have to agree -- it's not what I thought. I should have qualified what I said more carefully.

If the majority of other states lost jobs, then it's quite feasible for any state with positive job growth to have created more jobs than the rest combined.

edit: It's also feasible for the state which lost the most jobs, to still not have lost as much as all the other states combined.

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