Here’s a crucial paragraph from that “business climate” survey article in Chief Executive magazine that I blogged about earlier — ranking states.  It is so important, I’m putting it out as a separate item.

CEOs are well disposed to Texas, and it’s not hard to understand why. Fifty-two Fortune 500 companies now call Texas home. Fifteen Texas companies went public in 2011, making the state the hottest IPO market in the nation. Austin has become one of the fastest growing tech hubs. (The A5 chips in Apple’s iPhones and iPads are made in Austin.) Young programmers and engineers can actually afford to live well in Austin, where the housing cost index is 300 percent lower than in San Francisco. Texas job creation has outpaced the national average, too. Writing in Investors Business Daily, Wendell Cox commented that, “the number of jobs in Texas has grown by a truly impressive 31.5 percent since 1995, compared with just 12 percent nationwide, according to BLS data. Texas lapped California, an important economic rival and the only state with a larger population.” In addition, Texas jobs pay well and employees there fared better than the rest of the U.S. from 2002 to 2011, according BLS data.Adjusted for cost of living, Texas’ per capita income is higher than California’s and nearly as high as New York’s, observes Cox, who is principal of Demographia, a consultancy.