knotquiteawake wrote:It would be better if businesses AND people moved into the state instead of just people to take jobs... we've already got that issue from the south.
That is how I arrived here. I worked at the time for a small format printing/engraving company. We were primarily engravers of professional service firm stationery—i.e. letterhead, envelopes, business cards. We also offset printed their collateral materials. Our primary market.....about 95% of our customer base.....was law firms. Most of the rest were accountancies. Since our customers were all over the country, a central location like Dallas made sense. We picked up the business, lock, stock, and barrel, and moved the whole thing to Dallas in April of 2006. About half the employees at the time, 4 people, came with us. The others could not or would not pull up their roots and move, so we were in a hiring mode when we got here.
I ran the front shop and the prepress graphics side of things. Two other guys came with the back shop. And then there was the owner. We loaded up everything.....all the presses, supplies, etc., onto the backs of big semis on April 14 & 15 and the trucks left on the 15th. The employees, myself included, met up early on the morning of the 16th and caravanned out here together. Spent the first night in Albuquerque, and arrived at our hotel in Dallas on the evening of the 17th.
The company put us up in a hotel until we could get our own housing established.....which was hard at first because we worked LONG hours getting equipment offloaded and bolted down. But eventually, at the beginning of June, I found an apartment of my own in Grapevine and started making ready to receive my wife and son who had stayed behind so that my son could finish out the school year in Pasadena. In late June of 2006, I drove back out to California, collected my family, and we caravanned back out to Grapevine, arriving right at the end of the month.
We started house-hunting pretty quickly, and we made an offer on our current home in mid-July. And here we are.
Sadly, my employer (who had lived with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder since he was in high school) committed suicide on September 29 of 2007, and his widow, who was a partner at KPMG Pete Marwick, had no interest in owning a printing business. So my job became keeping the company operating until his widow could sell off the assets, and that is how I came to be self-employed. Had this happened back in California....and there is no reason to believe that it would not have....I would have faced the loss of employment with a substantial mortgage payment, and very difficult job prospects. Instead, when we moved we sold my California home for three times what we had paid for it just 7 years earlier. We bought a home free and clear in Grapevine with money left over. So when my boss died, I had no mortgage, and I was living in a state where the small business climate was much friendlier and I was able to start my own business.
That's the difference between Texas and California. People are crazy to stay in California. But that said, it is purely coincidental that I was already a conservative when I arrived here. One of the two back shop guys who came along on the move is an unapologetic Obamabot. No surprise that he also has defaulted on numerous loans, utilities, etc., etc., and had no credit. When he finally moved out of the hotel when his family arrived, he moved into the same apartment building I was living in. He was still there when I moved into my own home. I am also fairly certain that he is the person who stole my identity to set up a Verizon account addressed in that apartment complex after I had moved out. Later, when he moved to Bedford, lo and behold, I had another Verizon ID theft in Bedford. I can't prove it, but it is too coincidental, and too consistent with the character of the guy. So the bitter truth is that people of low character are also smart enough to realize that moving to Texas might give them fresh pickings after they've worn out their welcomes in California. The problem is this: conservatives are far more likely than liberals to be fed up enough with California to consider moving to Texas, but liberals need jobs too and they far outnumber California conservatives. Consequently, liberals certainly equal in number those conservatives moving from California to Texas, if not outright outnumbering them. And being liberals, they are not yet adult in their thinking. Consequently they are going to bring with them the childish notion that their liberalism will somehow improve the state, rather than accepting that the state's general conservatism is the reason for its economic health.
Long term........and many of you are going to be angered by this statement.......Texas is headed the way of California unless something monumental happens to stop the flow from other states which are failing under leftist governments. Consider that, a century ago California used to be reliably republican and conservative and enjoyed much prosperity. That prosperity lasted until leftists began gaining the upper hand in the 1960s-1970s. Even then, California still had
residual prosperity until leftists were eventually able to dismantle the engines of prosperity. This will happen here eventually, unless the flow of "refugees" is shut off. One of my business associates, a conservative/libertarian IT business owner from Massachusetts who is a gun owner and MA CCW permit holder, moved here this past June. When we were talking about the phenomenon of moving from liberal states to Texas, he said that he was in a
hurry to get here because he was worried that the "flow" might get shutoff before he could make it, and he did not want to be stuck in MA when in happened. But for every one like him or me, there are
more who are decidedly liberal who are moving here for economic reasons, and then their liberalism is going to make them work to change Texas into the state they left.
It's coming. Unfortunately, there is no constitutional way to stop it. Don't take it out on me. I'm just the messenger.
