Texas Dominates The Best Cities For Good Jobs
Bernard Weinstein, an economist and associate director of SMU's Maguire Energy Institute, talks about Dallas as the best city to find a job.
By Daniel Fisher
Earlier this month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry made a quick tour of California to remind business owners that life’s a whole lot easier in the Lone Star State. Perry’s California critics called him “Governor Oops” for his miscues during the presidential debates, and Gov. Jerry Brown dismissed the Texan’s recruiting drive as “not a burp,” and barely even a certain bodily release of gas.
Laugh away, Californians. But Perry is playing the stronger hand here. Texas trounced the rest of the country our latest survey of the Best Cities for Good Jobs, with five metropolitan areas in the Top Ten, including the four best cities to find jobs in the next few years.
This year’s winner is Dallas, which shrugged off the Nov. 2011 bankruptcy of American Airlines parent AMR Corp. to rack up 2.1% job growth last year and is projected to continue adding jobs at a 2.8% rate through 2019 – more than 300,000 on top of the 2.1 million already in Dallas and its Plano and Irving suburbs.
“The explanation is we have an incredibly diversified economy,” said Bernard Weinstein, who’s been tracking the north Texas economy since 1975 and is associate director of Southern Methodist University‘s McGuire Energy Institute. “As the national economy improves, we’re getting better.”...