Why Texas Seceding (Again) Would Be Incredibly Stupid

The Texas GOP just passed a new party platform that includes support for holding a vote on Texan secession… lol

Just like believing that tax cuts for the rich will magically trickle down wealth to poor people, that Iran will voluntarily give up its nuclear ambitions if America “shows strength,” or that more guns everywhere will reduce gun violence, Texan secession can be tossed into the bin of Republicans’ absurdly dumb ideas.

Here’s a non-exclusive handful of reasons why:

1. If Texas became a foreign country, any Texan business that would want to stay American would leave, and Delaware would be an inviting place to go, as it has some of the most advantageous incorporation laws similar to Texas. This would lead to a crippling economic recession in Texas as its exiting corporations and businesses would likely take their employees with them, or cause a huge spike in Texan unemployment. The Texan government would then be on the hook for the surge in unemployment benefits (if it wanted to avoid catastrophic hunger, poverty, and homelessness) at the same time that the large number of Texans emigrating to America would collapse the Texan housing market. You couldn’t even guess what cascade of possible economic failures would follow that double-whammy.

2. Texan secession would be a giant betrayal of all the conservatives remaining in America. The 38 dependable Texan electoral votes would evaporate from the Republican Party’s calculus in American elections, and the GOP would have a considerably more difficult time winning the White House. Republicans have already lost seven of the previous eight presidential popular votes, and technicality victories in the Electoral College are increasingly Republicans’ only hope to control the executive branch. That hope would all but extinguish without Texas, particularly if a large influx of liberal citizens leave Texas for neighboring Southern states and turn Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana into swing states.

American Republicans would also lose the two Texan senators, and quite a handful of representatives since the highly populated blue states would now make up a bigger proportion of the populace after all the conservative Texans lose their US citizenship. This might complicate Texas’s foreign policy and international trade because its giant neighbor trading partner, the United States, would suddenly turn much more left wing. Perhaps a newly empowered and electorally boosted Democratic Party would be interested in imposing considerable economic tariffs on foreign Texan firms in support of hardworking, domestic companies and workers.

3. The Texan standard of living would immediately plummet losing access to all the US Government’s generous national programs and subsidies. Texan seniors would immediately lose their Social Security income, along with their Medicare and Medicaid benefits. College students would lose their Federal loans and grants, the poor would lose access to every Welfare program, and Texans would be on their own during hurricane season without FEMA assistance or Federal insurance for natural disasters.

If the Texas legislature stays committed to being a low-tax libertarian paradise after losing its Federal backstop, Texans’ lives would quickly turn dystopic. Meanwhile, the Texan government would need to somehow develop and fund its own border and homeland security, military, transportation, public education, currency, and healthcare system without splitting the cost for any of these with all the other US states like it used to do.

Texas would also have to laboriously join a plethora of international organizations to reclaim some of the benefits that US citizens enjoy, which would be ironic and humiliating because so many Texan conservatives hate them. For example, without seeking membership into the World Trade Organization, Texas would not have “Most Favored Nation” status with any other country, which means Texas would be economically discriminated against by most of the planet, including the United States. Texas would also have to beg the US to let it join the US-Canada-Mexico regional free trade agreement (USMCA) that replaced NAFTA. Maybe a US on liberal steroids would veto Texan membership on account of its lack of respect for democratic values. Either way, Texas would have to start working on trade deals and diplomatic relations with dozens of other countries immediately because those take a long time to work out.

4. Texas would likely have to accept and take on some of America’s sizable debt without having the benefit of income taxes from 300 million other Americans to help pay it off. Texas would find out real quick how convenient it is to reside in a country with a bunch of blue states with higher taxes that disproportionately pay for the Federal benefits and services Texans enjoy.

5. Texans’ new Founding Fathers to mythologize would include Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Louie Gohmert. Yuck. Imagine having portraits of Ted Cruz in every history book and government building. I just threw up in my mouth.

6. If Texas kept the U.S. dollar as its currency, its monetary policy would be subject to the whims of the now-foreign United States Federal Reserve. If Texas created its own currency, nobody would care about it, and Texans would lose a lot of financial and economic comfort.

As usual with Republican proposals, Texan secession sounds like a good idea until you think about it for more than two seconds. And this back-of-the-envelope forecasting is hardly an exhaustive list of all the ways in which Texans’ lives would get dramatically worse after seceding from the United States.

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