Texas was found to be the state with the fewest personal freedoms, according to the Cato Institute’s new Freedom Index.
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.
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
“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.
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?
Except when there was corona hysteria, anyways. Even at the peak, I saw only a handful of people wearing masks.
It was not hysteria. Lots of people died. And, yes, Scandinavians wore masks a lot.
And, yes, Scandinavians wore masks a lot.
Where did you get that from? We definitely didn’t, it was quite uncommon to see people with masks, the majority didn’t use them ever. Why are you, an American, gaslighting me how it happened in my own country?
Du er ret hurtig til at dømme andre…klovn…
Google says this one says:
You are quite quick to judge others…clown…
Du verkar vara helt besatta av politik från där borta, men okej, visst. Kanske danskar gick överstyr med munkorgen, men det gjorde inte vi svenskar.
Google says this one says:
You seem to be totally obsessed with politics from over there, but okay, sure. Maybe the Danes went overboard with the muzzle, but we Swedes didn’t.
Sounds like the opposite of freedom to me.
Unless you want to protest cultures of sexism, hemophobia, and bigotry , in which case you will get charged with hate crimes for burning some paper.
hemophobia
Yeah fuck blood, all my homies hate blood
Just those disgusting mustard bloods, and the ones with lesser blue bloods.
Every once in a while someone reinvents homestuck
I WOULD PRESS YOUR *UP VOTING* BUTTON TO INCREASE THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF POSTING KARMA ON THIS HUMAN DISCUSSION SERVICE BUT I SEE THAT MY *PAST SELF* HAS ALREADY DONE SO.
*EDIT:* I HAD TO EDIT MY MESSAGE FROM THE ORIGINAL TEXT BECAUSE MY CHOSEN EMPHASIS WAS NOT INTERPRETED AS INTENDED AND REQUIRED A PRECEDING BACKSLASH TO BE READ WITH AN ASTERISK AND NOT AS TEXT EMPHASIS, OR *ITALICS* AS ONE MIGHT CALL IT.
And stay inside your home…
Why?
Never trust anything the Cato Institute says, as a rule. It’s almost certainly garbage.
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.
It’s extremely biased, but not garbage. I say this as someone that has watched and read right wing news for years. Heritage Foundation is garbage. Cato is ideologically consistent and actually has good arguments. AEI is also good for extremely biased arguments.
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.
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
Can I see these numbers because I find that threshold to be entirely unbelievable?
Sure, im looking for where i saw that number 660k number specifically, but here is an article that shows the fact that you pay less up to that 600k range:
According to ITEP, Texans whose salaries fall into the lowest 20 percent of income earners (making less than $20,900 annually) pay about 13 percent of their income in state and local taxes. Meanwhile, Californians in the bottom 20 percent (making less than $23,200 annually) pay 10.5 percent. In Texas, the middle 20 percent of income earners ($35,800-$56,000) pay 9.7 percent in state and local taxes in contrast to middle income Californians ($39,100-$62,300), who only pay 8.9 percent. Most glaringly, the top 1 percent of earners in Texas ($617,900 or more) pay 3.1 percent of their income in contrast to top earnings in California ($714,400 or more) who pay 12.4 percent.
It seems unbelievable because of right wing propaganda, but the actual tax data doesnt lie. Almost all Texans are taxed higher than Californians by their respective states.
Wow, that’s crazy. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were up to some much smaller number, but I’m shocked it’s actually that high. I appreciate the link.
It’s like raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiinnnn…
Shh stop with the rain talk or Perry is going to start suggesting prayer as a solution to drought again …
But muh freedoms?
Are far less than they are in other parts of the world.
Yes, that is what this post is saying.
From the part of small government, comes……
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.
Gun owners and WASPs: the irony!
Land of the oppressed.
All that sweet, sweet economic freedom causes Fled Cruz.
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.
You can see their methodology. Texas came last for personal freedom, but their corporate freedom gave then a top ten result
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.
30 days to change address if you move within the state, 90 if from outside. 521.054, 521.029
30 days for car registration - 502.040
How many nations were not once slave states? It seems very low. Texas as part of Mexico also enslaved people till 1830.
Not nations, but only 13 of the US states allowed slavery. Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. So roughly 26% of the total states of the US, however since there were only 36 states at the time of the Civil War, that would bring the percentage of slavery supporting states to a whopping 36.111R% of the existing states at the time.
It seems very strange that Oklahoma isn’t on that list. I know why, but still.
Those Texans were presumably Americans and as such were hypocrites when many went on about freedom while tolerating, at times engaging in, genocide and slavery.
In 1829, slavery was officially outlawed in Mexico.[26] Austin feared that the edict would cause widespread discontent and tried to suppress publication of it. Rumors of the new law quickly spread throughout the area and the colonists seemed on the brink of revolt.
The new Texas constitution specifically allowed slavery and said no free person of African descent could reside in the new country without Congress’s consent.[82]
till
If you meant ‘until’ and not ‘cash drawer’, that’s a different word.
I’m an autistic masters student in linguistics and I’m better at giving orthographic advice, while being the kind of person who refers to it as “orthographic advice.” You should probably learn how to be more polite, because it really helps in life.
