This video is done in a collaboration with Wisecrack, so make sure to check out their video next.
So this is a very special video for me,
because as I'm sure many of you already know, I live in Texas, and have lived here for nearly my entire life.
So, naturally, I've always wondered what Texas would be like if it was actually its own independent country.
It used to be one once for a quick point in history between 1836 and 1846
before it got annexed by the United States.
But what would this independent Texas look like today if it ever happened?
First of all, Texas basically gets second place in everything inside the U.S.
It has the second largest population behind California,
the second largest economy, also behind California,
and the second largest area behind Alaska.
But that doesn't mean that Texas is small,
the Texan population stands at 28,305,000 people,
which would make it the 50th most populous country in the world, ahead of a lot bigger countries like Australia.
While Texas is much smaller than Australia in terms of land, it's much bigger than any country in Europe is except for Russia.
Texas is so big on a European scale that you could fit all of Poland inside of it
and still have room to drive around the edges.
The town of Texarkana in the east is closer to Chicago, Illinois than to the city of El Paso on the western side of Texas.
If it was independent, Texas would be the 39th largest country in the world in terms of land area.
But the final big thing about Texas is its economy.
The Texan economy stands currently at a GDP of 1.599 trillion U.S. dollars.
This is enormous and would make Texas the 11th largest economy in the world,
beating out other giant countries like South Korea, Russia, and Australia again.
Big companies like American Airlines, AT&T, Dell, and Exxon Mobil
all have headquarters currently located in Texas, which dramatically adds to this economic power.
Texas is probably one of the few U.S. states that actually could succeed as an independent country,
and here are a few reasons why:
First, it has a coast, and therefore access to the world's shipping routes.
Houston is the 8th busiest port in the United States and already has shipping routes connected with
Brazil, the Netherlands, Germany, India, and China.
Second, Texas is what's called a Tax-Donor state,
meaning that the Texan state government sends more money to the federal government
than it receives back in benefits.
For every one dollar that Texas sends to Washington, it receives back just 94 cents.
This means that Texas could fund all of their current government expenditures
and still have enough left over to generate a nice budget surplus.
Compared with other states like Mississippi,
who gets three dollars back from the federal government for every one dollar they send,
Texas would be in a great financial situation at first upon becoming independent.
The final reason Texas would be self-sustainable is energy.
Let's switch over to a map of the U.S. electrical grid to see how that's the case.
There are only three main power grids in the mainland United States that the U.S. operates:
The western grid, the eastern grid, and the Texan grid.
Texas has its own fully independent electrical grid that wouldn't be influenced by the rest of the U.S.
If another state like, say, New Mexico decided to leave
the rest of the U.S. could just shut off that part of the grid and deny them electrical access.
Not so with Texas. But here's the really interesting part:
Back in 1840, Texas used to be a lot bigger,
back then, it claimed about half of modern New Mexico,
and also chunks of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and even as far north as Wyoming.
If, for some reason, the modern Texas was expanded back to this territory today
it wouldn't really add as much as you think.
The population would only go up by a little over 1.2 million people,
because besides the towns of Santa Fe in New Mexico and Pueblo in Colorado,
most of this extra land is pretty rural.
But back in 1840, the entirety of Texas was even more rural.
Back then, the entire population of Texas was an incredible 70,000 people,
basically the size of a small suburb of either Dallas or Houston is today.
The only settlements you can see on maps from back then
were San Antonio, Houston, and Santa Fe, which were all basically islands of people
separated by hundreds, or thousands of kilometers of open and unpopulated land.
Texas has changed dramatically since then in just a little over one and a half centuries,
from a rural backwater on the fringes of the world to an economic powerhouse home to tens of millions.
But there's one more thing that we haven't touched on yet, and that's if Texas could actually legally do this.
The answer is a definitive no.
The U.S. government has made it explicitly clear that no states can ever leave the union
since the last time that was tried didn't really go over so well.
This includes Texas, who can never ever hope to compete with the U.S. military.
Texas does have a pretty weird clause though in its consitution that allows the state to, at any time,
divide itself into five different, smaller states.
Texas doesn't need permission from the U.S. congress to do this,
and it would immediately quintuple their own power in the U.S. senate
from having two senators up to ten senators.
This could enable Texas to influence the U.S. government more heavily,
but likely wouldn't help it to achieve independence.
The vast majority of people living inside of Texas don't want independence anyway,
but it's always just fun to speculate.
The secession of Texas is just one of the many themes of one of my all-time favorites games: Deus Ex.
It's about a grim future where humans can be technologically enhanced
and where every conspiracy theory is more or less true.
My friends over at Wisecrack just released a video exploring the philosophy of the whole series,
which explores how paranoia and chaos operate in society,
and whether or not we should all be excited about becoming cyborgs.
So check it out by clicking here, and tell them that RealLifeLore sent you.
Don't forget to subscribe, and I'll see you next friday for another brand new video then.