The defensive case is won. Texas can pay its own way. It will not lose its Social Security. It will not crater. It owes no ransom on the way out. But a people does not rouse itself to a hard and historic thing merely because the thing is survivable. It rouses for what the thing is for. So the real question is not whether Texas can afford to govern itself. It is what Texas would do with the governing once it had it back.
Because that is what independence really is. Not subtraction, the loss of Washington, but addition, the return of choice. Every dollar counted here as a cost of governing Texas, a sovereign Texas would spend on its own terms, for its own reasons, answerable to its own people. Here is what that means, one plain thing at a time.
Its defense. Take the sharpest example first. Texans send about 70 to 80 billion dollars a year, their share of a military that costs close to a trillion, and most of it is not aimed at the defense of Texas. It garrisons roughly 750 bases in 80 countries, keeps 170,000 troops on foreign soil, and sails eleven carrier groups built to reach the far side of the world. That is the budget of a global-reach power, and Texans pay into it without ever being asked. A Texas that defended Texas would need a fraction of it. Australia fields its entire modern military for about 35 billion dollars, and a Texas at that level would still outrank all but about eighteen of the world's armed forces. The choice independence hands back is worth 35 to 45 billion dollars a year, the whole difference between funding a global posture and defending a homeland. And say it plainly, because Texans honor the people who wear the uniform: this is not a retreat from strength. It is a Texas military that answers to Texans, guards Texas, and stops spending their money on wars and garrisons they never chose. Sovereign, Texas would still field one of the strongest forces on earth. It would simply point it at Texas.
Its rules. A free Texas writes its own law. Today it lives under more than a million federal restrictions it had no hand in writing, drafted by agencies in a city that has never understood what Texas does or how it does it. The rules that bind an oil field, a cattle ranch, a chemical plant, a border county, are written by people who have worked none of them, and Texas cannot vote a single one of them out. Independence does not promise fewer rules, or more. It promises Texan rules, made by Texans, fitted to the work Texans actually do, and repealed by Texans when they fail. A people that cannot write the law it lives under is not yet governing itself. A people that can, is.
Its money. Every figure here is, in the end, the same figure seen from a different angle: Texans' money leaving Texans' hands. The 68 billion a year more than they get back. The 72 to 80 billion in interest on a debt they never chose. The tens of billions that fund a global military instead of a Texas one. The inflation that lifts more still from their savings every year. These are not to be added into one grand total, because they overlap, and we do not traffic in inflated numbers. They are four windows onto a single fact. A great deal of what Texans earn is spent by people they did not elect and cannot remove. A sovereign Texas keeps its own and spends it on Texas, not as a windfall, which we have been careful never to promise, but as a decision, made in Austin and answerable at the next Texas election. The question was never whether Texas generates enough. It plainly does. The question is who decides where it goes.
Its energy. Here is the asset no other would-be nation on earth can match, and the one the present arrangement treats as something to be restrained. Texas pumps about 42 percent of America's crude oil and more than a quarter of its natural gas (U.S. Energy Information Administration). Standing alone, Texas would rank as roughly the fourth-largest oil producer on Earth, behind only the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. It already runs its own electric grid, the only state that does, answerable to Texas and not to Washington. Its Gulf Coast anchors the export of American gas to the world. A sovereign Texas is not a poor country hoping to strike it rich. It is an energy giant, already built, that would stop asking permission to power itself and would sell to the world on its own terms. Independence does not create that strength. It unchains it.
Its future. Read the direction Texas is already moving, and read it as destiny rather than defense. More people move to Texas from other states than to anywhere else in the union. More companies move their headquarters to Texas than to any other state, and it has taken the Governor's Cup for the most new and expanded facilities fourteen years running. Given a free choice, capital and labor are choosing Texas right now, under a federal system that taxes and regulates and inflates against them. They are voting with their feet for a place that is younger, freer, and growing while much of the rest of the union ages and stalls. Independence asks a simple thing. Let a people the whole continent is moving toward stop subsidizing the decline of the places they are leaving, and build its own future with its own hands.
Itself. Beneath every one of these is the thing they are all made of. A nation, the men who thought hardest about it concluded, is not a matter of blood or border. It is a people who share a past and choose, together and daily, to share a future, and who claim the right to govern themselves upon their own land. By that measure Texas has been a nation the whole time, waiting on a decision it has not yet made. Independence is that decision. It is not a flag, or an anthem, or a line on a map. It is a free people resuming the oldest and most human of political acts, governing itself, deciding for itself, answering to itself. That is what all the numbers have finally been for. Not to prove that Texas can survive on its own, though it can. To remind Texans that a people able to govern itself, and choosing not to, has set down something it will one day have to explain to its grandchildren.