Related: Texas vs California and New York
Texas has created 80% of american jobs in 2008, rejects stimulus spending money and calls for National Tea Party says Palin approved Governor Perry...
Video: Texas Governor Rick Perry says "This administration...is interested in punishing Texas" and "Time to make Tea Parties twice as big as what they were"
 "Green" California leads the nation in job losses...and Czech president says unlike Gore he is able to listen to competing theories...
Newly released stats by Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Job Creation not Job losses are driving unemployment revealing why the stimulus package is not working as the Obama administration claimed it would.

From the NCPA....
 
AMERICA AS TEXAS VS. CALIFORNIA

Demographic researchers have compared America's two most populous states, California and Texas, in an attempt to identify why the former is imploding economically, and the latter is growing and creating wealth.  They found four major reasons, says Ryan Streeter, a senior fellow at the London-based Legatum Institute.Texans on average believe in laissez-faire markets with an emphasis on individual responsibility:

• California's policy-makers favor central planning solutions and a reliance on a government social safety net.
• This unrelenting commitment to big government has led to a huge tax burden and triggered a mass exodus of jobs.

Californians have largely treated environmentalism as a "religious sacrament" rather than as one component among many in maximizing people's quality of life:

• Environmentally-based land-use restriction centered in California has played a huge role in inflating the recent housing bubble.
• Similarly, an unwillingness to manage ecology proactively for man's benefit has been behind the recent epidemic of wildfires.

California has placed "ethnic diversity" above "assimilation," while Texas has done the opposite:

• "Identity politics" has created psychological ghettos that have prevented many of California's diverse ethnic groups and subcultures from integrating fully into the mainstream.
• Texas, on the other hand, has proactively encouraged all the state's residents to join the mainstream.

The two states have opposite views on regulation and litigation:

• Texas has focused on streamlining the regulatory and litigation burden on its residents.
• Meanwhile, California's government has attempted to use regulation and litigation to transfer wealth from its creators to various special-interest constituencies.

Source: Ryan Streeter, "America as Texas vs. California," The American, November 23, 2009.
For text:
http://blog.american.com/?p=7451
For more on Economic Issues:
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=17