Fact-check: Does Texas have ‘lower taxes and less regulations’ than any state in the U.S.?
PolitiFact's ruling: False
Here's why: For years,
While Perry has faded from mainstream politics after two failed presidential bids, the principles set forth under the Texas Miracle banner have not.
"
It's true that state
'Less regulations'
Measuring and ranking states' regulatory rules has never been straightforward. There are various methods that policy analysts have used to quantify government regulations.
Some have taken a simplistic approach by counting words or pages in a government's regulatory code. Take for instance President
Other measurements narrowly analyze a specific area of regulations, or regulations that pertain to a certain industry group. For instance, the
And others take more anecdotal approaches by using public surveys or surveys of industry stakeholders that measure perceptions of a state's regulatory framework. For instance,
In any case,
"The regulatory thicket in
"Generally speaking, it's a state that has a lot of regulation because of a sizable health care community, the massive chemical manufacturing industry, and a host of occupational licensing restrictions," Rottinghaus said.
Perhaps the most advanced method for quantifying and ranking states' entire regulatory framework comes from the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank associated with
Instead of looking at word or page counts of state codes, a method that has been criticized as being too simplistic and arbitrary, State RegData counts the number of times a code uses restrictive or directive terminology, words like "shall," "must," "may not," "required," and "prohibited."
Comparing state codes this way,
"Just on the basis of, is (Williams') claim true or not, I would say it's not true, at least by our measure," said
Rottinghaus and Broughel agree that there is a positive correlation between the size of a state's population or economy and the volume of its regulations. Last month, Broughel and the Mercatus Center released a study on the relationship between regulatory volume and population size, which hypothesized that larger economies demand more regulations due to the diversity and size of their industries.
But even if calculating states' regulatory volume per population,
Calculating state restrictions per million dollars of gross state product,
'Lower taxes'
Williams' other claim, that
"
According to a 2020 report by the
Another study by the personal finance website WalletHub, found that
Our ruling
Williams said that
Studies also show that despite having no state income tax, its overall per capita tax burden does not rank as the lowest in the
We rate this claim False.
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