Texas leads only Mississippi in food insecurity, which means a household struggles to put food on the table. The 2010 national average is 14.5%; the figure for Texas is 18.8%. Significantly, in 2007-2009 the national average was also 14.5%, while Texas was at 17.4%. Given that Texas represents about 8% of the population of the United States, everyone else on the average got slightly better while Texas got worse.
Think Progress
Why, given the economic collapse, has the national average stayed constant? Because of Federal programs like SNAP.
And what has contributed to Texas' problems? That they privatized their food stamp eligibility office, and it went badly, contributing to a backlog of 60,000 applications.
And of course Rick Perry hates food stamps.
At a campaign stop in Iowa last month, though, Gov. Rick Perry was less enthusiastic about food stamps, calling the program a “testament to widespread misery.”
At the time, Perry was touting his part in Texas’ job creation record, suggesting that as president, he’d help improve a situation that has one in eight Iowans relying on the government for food. “Food stamps are not the solution. They’re a symptom of the problem that 2 million people are without work.”
So there you have conservative ideological failure in a nutshell. People are hungry; the only thing keeping off widespread starvation is a Federal program; privatization failed and resulted in more hungry people; the "Texas job creation miracle" relies on jobs that pay so poorly that people can't afford to eat; and Rick Perry's response is to criticize the Federal program that is keeping the wolf from millions of doors in his state.
BTW, the difference between the national 14.5% rate, and the Texas 18.8% rate, would be 4.3% of the population of Texas, which is 26M, so that is 1.1M additional hungry people in Texas.
If this be a miracle it is one performed by a lesser god. Reworking the old joke about surgery, the miracle was a success, but the patient died.