Ex-Texan here.
It's a wonderful place to be a straight, white, Christian, middle-class male.
For every one of those things you are not, it gets worse.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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What about rich instead of middle?
Even better. It's only when you're rich that you actually pay less taxes in Texas. See how they're anagrams?
As a persone who lives in TX, i can confirm anyone who has a " Don't Tred on Me" or a "Come and Take It" sticker, flag, or shirt likes to be treaded on and will willingly give it up
They're secretly hoping some liberal dominatrix walks on them and beats them up until they give up their guns?
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Go up to them and quote Luke 10:19 at them, but make them look it up.
Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
"Tread on me, Daddy," and "Come and take it out on my ass"
The Cato institute dissing Texas is actually hilarious. Republican infighting is the gift that keeps on giving.
chef's kiss👌
Never trust anything the Cato Institute says, as a rule. It's almost certainly garbage.
Sure, but when a conservative propaganda machine claims that even Texas is too authoritarian ...
Then they just have an agenda to say those freedoms were taken by Democrats, and that you really need more freedom via deregulation.
First you sell the problem, then you sell your solution.
Even for Republicans that's an incredibly bold move. Democrats have been the minority party in Texas for over a decade.
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I kind of did the same with The Heritage Foundation.
They have a page cataloging every single instance of voter fraud they could find, and they're up to... 1,474. Total. Since 1982. Regardless of party. In the same span of time, just looking at presidential elections, over 1.1 billion ballots were cast.
This is an abjectly evil "think tank" behind Project 2025, which actively pushes the big voter fraud lie to push mass disenfranchisement, and even they could only find an astronomically small rate of voter fraud.
Came here to say this.
Ironically, Cato Institute is bankrolled by Koch brothers, the architects of modern republican party
Is it ironic though? Seems exactly what I would expect.
Yep. We can look at the source to see what their metrics are. They have economic freedoms and personal freedoms.
The metrics for economic freedoms they used are fiscal and regulatory freedom. Focusing on fiscal, that branches down into: state taxes, local taxes, government spending, government employment, government debt, and "cash & security assets." It's obviously a libertarian based definition of "economic freedom", wherein they feel someone with $5 to their name and no obligations is more economically free than someone with $100 to their name and $10 of taxes. Completely illogical bullshit.
But you can look at it and see that a lot of them are incoherent or intentionally overlapping even if you buy into their base ideology.
Why are government spending and government taxation separate entries? Is someone with low taxes less "economically free" because their government budget is able to afford to be larger anyway? Why does government employment factor in at all? Surely — especially after you've accounted for any budgetary, taxation, and debt based impacts — there's nothing inherent to government employees existing that can be argued to impact someone's "economic freedom." Even within their base libertarian fantasies, the overlap and design of the categories will specifically make a richer, but otherwise completely identical, state less free than a poorer copy-cat.
The rest of their categories are even more bullshit. They have an entire section under personal freedom categorized as "Travel Freedom." A sane person might define that as both the right and the capacity to travel places. They define it as "This category includes seat belt laws, helmet laws, mandatory insurance coverage, and cell phone usage laws." So a state is less "free" according to Cato if it makes it illegal to text while driving.
tl;dr it's all libertarian bullshit.
I agree. I thought it was noteworthy that Cato put Texas last. They are not a neutral news source. But they did put Texas last in personal freedoms.
I don't know anything about them. Care to elaborate?
It's basically just a psyop by Charles Koch, trying to spread propaganda to land favourable policy changes for him and his kind.
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For real freedom, move to Scandinavia.
Cant speak to freedoms, but I've never witnessed a more intense social pressure to confirm to social norms than I did there
Where’s Japan sit in the list?
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From the part of small government, comes…..
But don't they have the gunz and the low taxez?!!!?
Texas has one of the highest tax rates for poorer people last i hear
Yup. When you take into account all state taxes, including their very high property taxes, you pay less taxes in California than texas if you make less than 660k.
After 660k? You save tons and tons of money. There is a reason a bunch of billionares have moved their "permanent residence" to the state
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In the overall freedom rankings, New Hampshire rated number 1, followed by Florida and South Dakota, while New York was dead last, with Hawaii 49th and California 48th. For personal freedoms, Nevada came tops followed by Arizona and Maine, with Wyoming 48th and Idaho 49th
Florida ranks number 2 for overall freedom? Not sure how much I trust the Cato institute’s methodology.
Cato is a very conservative\ libertarian group. The fact that they put Texas last for personal freedom seemed noteworthy to me.
They are 100% biased.
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No shit, being able to own as many guns as you want but having a militarized police force that'll try to figure out how many teeth you can swallow if you don't pray to them isn't actually freedom.
All that sweet, sweet economic freedom causes Fled Cruz.
Gun owners and WASPs: the irony!
Land of the oppressed.
It's not too surprising given that Texas was founded as a slave republic.
I suppose things might be mitigated, though:
women who need abortions can go to New Mexico for such (that and more regular use of pregnancy tests).
maybe get a driver's license out of state and use it in Texas—I also wonder if one can use fake fingerprints.
maybe have open-carry marijuana protests on Hitler's Birthday.
I drove from Houston to San Diego once. It was 26 hours and a ton of it was within Texas. You can drive for 8 or more hours and easily still be in Texas.
Also, out-of-state license whilst residing in Texas is illegal. You only have so many days (14, IIRC) to change your address on your Texas license if moving within Texas. I got hit with that at a traffic stop.
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