RICK PERRY HAS RECEIVED A LOT OF MONEY FROM THE RICH AND POWERFUL — and he’ll likely receive even more during his presidential campaign. What’s interesting is that if top donors like the wealthy and oil companies pay his way, which do you think Perry would be more likely to do away with for budgeting purposes: 1) tax breaks for the rich, 2) tax subsidies and loopholes for profitable corporations, or 3) Medicare and other services and programs for everyone else?

Perry has received a total of $37 million over the last decade from just 150 individuals and couples, who are likely to form the backbone of his new effort to win the Republican presidential nomination. The tally represented more than a third of the $102 million he had raised as governor through December, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice. Nearly half of those mega-donors received hefty business contracts, tax breaks or appointments under Perry… (via Los Angeles Times)

Think Progress reports on how much Perry has been funded by Big Oil:

Just Like former President George W. Bush, Rick Perry is heavily funded by the oil and gas industry. In fact, it has been Rick Perry’s very top source of funding:

Top oil company contributions include $189,188 from Exxon Mobil, $147,895 from Valero Energy, and $116,000 from Koch Industries.

But the big money rolling into Perry’s campaign coffers has ultimately been good for Texas, right? Isn’t there a ‘miracle’ going on with employment in Texas — don’t those tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs for everyone else? Marie Diamond comments on the employment situation in Texas:

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is taking issue with the “Texas miracle” myth that Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is selling. This morning, Rangel told reporters that Perry’s record of job creation is nothing to be proud of because the jobs pay such low wages that “it’s one stage away from slavery.” Today, a New York Times review of Perry’s track record concluded, “Texas has one of the highest percentages of workers who are paid the minimum wage and receive no medical benefits.” Perry has also presided over a steady, decade-long decline in his state’s employment to population ratio. He inherited a ratio of more than 47 percent from George W. Bush, but now only 43.5 percent of Texans have a job, compared to 44.7 percent of the total U.S. population.

Who benefits from paying minimum wage without benefits do you suppose? Good bye, middle-class! Pat Garofalo points out unemployment numbers in Texas vs. the entire United States — Texas is worse:

Reuters’ Felix Salmon today highlighted data showing that Texas employment-to-population ratio — the percentage of the population that has a job — has plummeted under 2012 presidential contender Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) watch:

THE LAST THING AMERICA NEEDS RIGHT NOW is Perry’s preferential treatment for Big Money donors combined with his ‘Texas miracle’ for our nation’s unemployment problem. Or as Paul Krugman says,

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.

So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.