"You cherry-picked by leaving out Social Security and Medicare."
It is the opposite of cherry-picking. Those programs are the single largest category of federal spending, and leaving them on the cost side is what would rig the result, because they are individual benefits that follow people regardless of where they live, not a cost of operating a government. We took them off the cost side and, to be fair, off the revenue side too, the payroll taxes that fund them. The conclusion survives both ways. Cherry-picking means your result collapses without the favorable assumption. Ours does not. That is the definition of not cherry-picking.
"But the Rockefeller Institute says Texas is a net recipient."
It does, and we cite it ourselves. That is a balance-of-payments fact, and the report explains exactly why it is true and why it is irrelevant to whether Texas can fund its own government. Both things are true at once. A state can receive more than it pays on the federal ledger, because of borrowing and returning benefits, and still pay for its own government with room to spare. The Rockefeller number answers a question we are not asking.
"Won't Texans lose their Social Security?"
This is the scare they lean on hardest, and it falls apart on the law, on the arithmetic, and on the negotiating table, in that order.
On the law, Social Security is portable. U.S. citizens collect it anywhere in the world, for life, with only a handful of country exceptions. The "benefits stop after six months abroad" rule that critics quote is a rule for non-citizens. Texans are overwhelmingly citizens and would stay citizens through any transition. On top of that, the United States already maintains about 30 "totalization" agreements with other countries for the express purpose of keeping benefits flowing across borders. A retiree in Lisbon draws her Social Security because the U.S. and Portugal have such an agreement. Continuity is the developed world's norm, not the exception.
On the arithmetic, Texas could run its own system comfortably, and would start ahead. Its workforce is younger than the rest of the union's, a median age of 35.9 against 39.2. Texans already pay an estimated 12 to 13 billion dollars a year more into Social Security than Texas retirees take out, money that currently props up the rest of the union. Keep it home and the system starts in the black. And there is a colder reason not to leave the program in Washington's keeping. In Flemming v. Nestor (1960) the Supreme Court held that no American has a contractual right to a Social Security check. Congress can cut or rewrite benefits whenever it chooses, and on its current path the trust fund runs dry in the early 2030s. The "guarantee" Texans are warned they would be risking is one Washington can revoke at will, and is already on track to break.
On the negotiating table, the benefits are not a weakness. They are Texas's strongest card. These are earned, pre-paid obligations. The Treasury's own FY2025 financial report puts the federal government's unfunded 75-year Social Security and Medicare promise at 88.4 trillion dollars, and Texans funded about 8.7 percent of the system that owes it. In any separation, what each side owes the other gets netted out. The benefit obligations Washington owes Texans are large enough that they exceed even the highest debt-apportionment method. Texas comes to the table holding a claim bigger than the bill, which turns the debt question from a liability Texas carries into a card Texas holds. Texans do not lose their Social Security. They hold one of the strongest cards at the table.
"How would an independent Texas pay for defense?"
Defense spending in Texas already runs 47 to 72 billion dollars a year, about 60 billion on the multiyear average, more than any other state in its peak year. That already sits well above the roughly 35 billion dollars Australia spends to field its entire modern military. The state hosts roughly 211,000 defense personnel across an enormous installed base: Fort Hood, Joint Base San Antonio, Fort Bliss, Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, the B-1B wing at Dyess, and the training bases at Sheppard and Laughlin, among others.
An independent Texas would not copy Washington's roughly one-trillion-dollar global-posture budget. It would defend Texas, which benchmarks to capable middle powers. A Texas military at Australia's level, drawn from a 453 billion dollar revenue base, would still outspend all but about eighteen of the world's 150-plus armed forces. The defense base already sitting in Texas is a foundation, not a gap, and it fits comfortably inside Texas's means.
"What about Medicare and veterans?"
Like Social Security, veterans' cash benefits and the earned, payroll-funded core of Medicare (Part A) are portable federal obligations to individuals, and they get handled at the same table and netted the same way. Medicare's Parts B and D are different, and we say so: they are funded about three-quarters out of general taxes, so an independent Texas keeps the taxes and keeps paying the benefit, and it washes rather than moving. Where something is genuinely a service delivered on Texas soil, a VA hospital, for instance, an independent Texas would take it over, and the headroom pays for it. Medicaid, which is means-tested welfare Texas already co-administers, we count as a cost the whole way through.
"The economy would crater the moment you seceded."
This is the one honest uncertainty in the whole case, and we treat it as one. A static snapshot cannot forecast a post-independence economy, and we will not pretend otherwise. So we start not with a rosy assumption but with the worst case, and show that even it holds.
Put a hard shock through the numbers, on the honest, symmetric basis. Assume Washington is hostile rather than cooperative, trade friction runs high, and independence knocks a full 10 percent off Texas's economy in one blow, more than twice the official estimate of Brexit's long-run cost. On that basis Texans pay about 333 billion dollars for a government that costs about 295. Take 10 percent off the top and Texas comes to roughly break-even on its own government, not a collapse, and the room to absorb it is fiscal headroom Texas leaves unused, not austerity. The budget does not need a friendly divorce to survive. It survives an ugly one.
Now the likelier case. The serious academic models of secession, and the real-world case everyone reaches for, Brexit, do not find that independence wrecks an economy. They find that erecting trade barriers does. Britain's own fiscal watchdog puts Brexit's long-run cost near 4 percent of GDP and says plainly it "largely reflects" new non-tariff barriers with its biggest market. That is the entire mechanism, and it is the one variable an independent Texas can hold nearly constant, by keeping free trade with the United States and keeping the dollar.
The record of peaceful separations bears it out. Singapore was thrown out of Malaysia in 1965 with 14 percent unemployment and no resources. It is now about twice as rich as Western Europe. Czechoslovakia split in 1993 and both halves grew. Norway's exit from Sweden in 1905 and Slovenia's from Yugoslavia in 1991 run the same way, a short adjustment and then decades of growth. No clean case of a peaceful separation produced lasting collapse. The damage tracks how much trade friction the two sides choose to build, not the fact of independence.
"Secession isn't even legal. Texas v. White settled it."
This objection gives up on the money and retreats to law. That retreat deserves a straight answer, and the movement has given it in full elsewhere. There is no clause in the Constitution that forbids a state from leaving. Article 1, Section 10 is the precise place the Framers listed what a state may not do, and this is nowhere on the list, and the Tenth Amendment reserves to the states and the people every power that was never handed up.
Texas v. White does not close that door. The case was a lawsuit about bonds. Its famous line about an "indestructible Union" was a remark the Court did not need in order to decide who owned the bonds, which makes it dictum rather than a holding, and the actual bond ruling the case produced was overruled sixteen years later in Morgan v. United States. The barrier has never been constitutional. It has been political.
The complete argument is set out at usexit.org/texas-v-white and in Daniel Miller's The Tethered Sovereign, and the fiscal case needs none of it, because the numbers answer whether Texas can afford to govern itself, whether or not the reader has yet settled the separate question of whether Texas may.
"This is just one organization's spin."
Then check it. Every load-bearing number in the report comes from the federal government's own published tables, most of them downloadable in an afternoon. And we did something no advocacy report bothers to do. We turned a team of hostile reviewers loose on our own draft, an economist, a fact-checker, a lawyer, and made them try to break it, and we corrected what they broke and disclosed what we deliberately do not claim. We do not ask you to trust the Texas Nationalist Movement. We ask you to trust the IRS, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the SSA, and the FDIC, and to notice which side of this debate is comfortable showing its sources.