Texas Funds Its Own Government and Sends Washington Billions More, New Report Finds

The Texas Nationalist Movement today released "Can Texas Make It?", a 46-page reassessment of what an independent Texas would cost and what Texans already pay. It is built almost entirely on federal and state government data, and its finding is blunt: Texas covers the full cost of government within its borders and still sends Washington tens of billions of dollars more than it gets back.

The whole case turns on one ledger. Texans send Washington and Austin about $453.5 billion a year. Running government at the federal and state level inside Texas costs about $295.3 billion. What is left, roughly $158 billion, the report is careful not to sell as a permanent surplus. It calls it what it is: proof that Texas raises more than its government costs, in every year the report examines, the pandemic included.

From there the report goes after the warnings independence skeptics have leaned on for years. Strip out the money Washington borrows, and Texas stops looking like a taker and starts looking like what it is, a net creditor sending about $68 billion a year more than it receives, behind only California and New York. Measured against the world, Texas is the eighth-largest economy on Earth, bigger than Russia, bigger than Canada, larger than the economies more than 180 countries run a whole government on. The "exit bill" Texans are threatened with has a floor of zero, because no treaty sets it, the estimates run from trillions down to nothing, and the Pentagon has never once passed an audit of the assets it would owe Texas back.

The report saves its hardest numbers for Washington's own books. The Treasury's auditors describe the federal path in a single word, unsustainable. Moody's, Fitch, and Standard and Poor's have each pulled the United States below its top credit rating. The federal debt crosses $40 trillion this October, and about $100,000 of it now sits on every young Texan, run up in a name that never voted on it. Every figure in the report is printed beside the government source it came from, the IRS, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Texas Comptroller among them.

"The question was never whether Texas could make it," said Daniel Miller, President of the Texas Nationalist Movement. "We answered it in Washington's own numbers, and they are not close. Texas pays for every level of government inside its borders and still ships tens of billions north it never sees again. The exit bill Texans are threatened with has a floor of zero. Washington's own auditors have stamped its books unsustainable. The case for staying was always a financial one, and it has collapsed."

The full report is at cantexasmakeit.com.