It was 20 years ago today that Texas seceded from the United States. At the time, many Texans thought things would get better if they jumped ship. And they did get better – for the USA.

When NASA moved its space center from Houston to Cape Canaveral, it robbed the former state of thousands of high-paying jobs as well as a lot of much-needed brainpower. The joke at the time was that the move dropped the average IQ of Texas 11 points. When the Defense Department closed all its Texas bases, the economy got even worse. At the time of secession there were 110,000 active military in Texas, with another 85,000 in the reserves. The money from their paychecks disappeared overnight. Mail delivery stopped and tens of thousands of U.S. postal workers were suddenly unemployed. Even with all its oil, Texas still couldn’t afford to maintain highways and waterways. FEMA stopped all work on Galveston, and the damage from subsequent hurricanes has not yet begun to be repaired. Crop support, Medicare and Medicaid stopped, as did unemployment insurance, food stamps and support for public housing. The country of Texas couldn’t afford to pay high school football coaches $1 million dollars anymore. Many of them quit in disgust.