OVER the weekend, I predicted that Rick Perry will be a formidable candidate. Although many progressives are discounting him—see Kevin Drum's post on "Why Rick Perry Won't Win" —we can tell that many do take him seriously. The giveaway is that his announcement has inspired a rush of critical commentary about his record, particularly the vaunted "Texas Miracle" of job creation that will be central to Mr Perry's campaign in the primary and in the general election, should it come to that.

One of the major entries comes from Paul Krugman, in a column about the "Texas Unmiracle", which my colleague M.S. discussed yesterday. Mr Krugman writes:

...What you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment. It's true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state's still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending. Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.

Texas's unemployment rate currently stands at 8.2%, which is a point below the national average, but nonetheless too high. That does complicate Mr Perry's claims to be some kind of economic magician, and more generally, as Mr Krugman suggests, some of the underlying factors and political decisions that have helped Texas through the recession can't be simply extrapolated to other states or scaled to the nation as a whole.

However, I would suggest that in the rush to debunk Mr Perry, Democrats are being a little hasty. The Perry campaign is giving the startling statistic that since June 2009, 40% of the net new jobs created in America have been in Texas—a state with less than 10% of the nation's people. The Dallas Fed, earlier this month, reckoned that Texas created 261,700 jobs between June 2009 and June 2011, compared to 524,000 in the nation as a whole. Given the tremendous need for jobs in this country—and grinding unemployment is a horrible thing, not a minor inconvenience—it's a little disheartening to think that people are rushing to dismiss what has happened in Texas just because it's Texas and because Mr Perry, with his accent and his swagger, is the state's governor. So let's put politics aside. Pretend that Mr Perry doesn't exist, and that there's been a dummy stuffed with straw sitting in his office this whole time. What would have happened in Texas?

As Mr Krugman and others have noted, oil prices have helped buoy the economy. However, Texas is less dependent on oil and gas than it once was and the industry does not explain all or even most of the job creation. Another analysis from the Dallas Fed explains that between 1997-2010, a 10% increase in the price of oil would boost Texas GDP by 0.5%—and employment by a bit less, 0.36%, because oil is capital-intensive. Between 1970-1987, by contrast, a 10% uptick would boost the state GDP by 1.9%, and employment by 1%. According to Karr Ingram, an economist with the Texas Petroleum Institute, the Texas oil and gas industry added more than 28,600 jobs since June 2010, or about 13% of the state's net jobs in that span. It would also be fair to say that the oil and gas industry has impacts on Texas that are not captured in the traditional indicators. For example, Texas's longtime energy leadership has helped spur its interest in wind power, an industry where it now leads the nation. It may be counterintuitive, but there's a sense among state politicians that if Texas has the institutional expertise to do energy, that should extend to renewables, too. In any case, we can see that oil and gas are important to Texas job creation, but hardly the whole story.

Mr Krugman's comment about surprisingly strict mortgage lending refers to regulations that were put in place after the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, which hit Texas pretty hard. The more general point is that in addition to Texas's natural resources, the state has a policy apparatus that predates Mr Perry and supports business—low taxes, generally few regulations (the mortgage lending being an exception), cheap labour, cheap land, etc. The state has also benefited from significant net population growth during the past decade, which has prompted job creation, including many of the service-sector "jobettes" that critics deride. Mr Krugman argues that population growth is down to "a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular." The comment about being attracted to Texas because of the warm weather suggests that Mr Krugman is on slightly shaky footing. It's a furnace right now. Some snowbirds come for the mild winters, but a lot of the in-migration is due to jobs—because companies have relocated here, because the military has expanded its footprint in Texas, or because people were looking at the unemployment rates and figured they would try their luck. It hasn't worked out for everyone, unfortunately. That's one reason why Texas's unemployment rate has jumped, too.

As for Mr Perry, since he does exist, what has he done? In his announcement speech he recited a four-part "recipe" for economic stewardship: low taxes, low regulation, tort reform, and "don't spend all the money." He actually hasn't cut that many taxes, partly because there wasn't much of a tax base to cut; Texas is one of the few states without an income tax, for example. His signature reform came in 2006, when he engineered a "swap" that lowered property tax rates—a constant complaint from homeowners—with the intention of offsetting those declines via an increase on the cigarette tax and a new margins tax on most businesses. Those new revenue streams haven't made up for the decline in property-tax receipts, so Republicans call this a net tax decrease and Democrats call it a structural deficit. More generally, what Mr Perry has done is resisted new taxes; here are a few counterexamples from Politifact. Similarly, he inherited a fairly minimal regulatory framework, but he does fight most new regulations, as in his lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency over its effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Mr Perry can take credit for a major tort reform passed in 2003, and a follow up "loser pays" reform earlier this year. Another thing in his toolbox—he doesn't talk about this—is that in 2003 the legislature established the Texas Enterprise Fund, a "deal-closing fund" that gives the governor subsidies and incentives to use in his efforts to woo, or if you'd prefer, poach businesses from elsewhere. This seems to deviate from free-market orthodoxy and it has exposed him to charges of crony capitalism, but it has also helped his administration create jobs.

Now, clearly, the virtues of this approach are debatable. It may be that cutting taxes and regulations and services is a good way to attract business but a bad thing to do, on balance, because it leaves you less money for health care and education and infrastructure—areas where Texas lags the nation as a whole, and indeed, if nothing else, areas where the state must do better if it is going to have a worthwhile economy in the future. And I certainly don't mean to endorse Mr Perry's approach; personally, I have a lot of problems with it, although I do think the unemployment rate is a key measure of social welfare. But if we're talking strictly about job creation, Mr Perry has a good pitch. He deserves partial credit for Texas's job growth, just as he deserves partial blame for the state's stagnation on other metrics.