From a fiscal standpoint, the Texas model was less highly leveraged than many blue states, primarily because Texans placed fewer demands on government. Compared with California and other blue states, Texas kept its spending low. It paid its public employees relatively low salaries, pensions and other benefits, and offered the poor modest social services, all choices that were more defensible in light of the state's comparatively low cost of living. These choices helped Texas keep its long-term spending commitments, and thus its fiscal vulnerability, below blue state levels. At the same time, the Texas model involved trade-offs and created its own vulnerabilities. Even in times of economic plenty, many believed that the state's tight budgets created gaps in its education, health care and welfare systems, and allowed too many Texans to fall through a relatively thin safety net. Notably, not all such assessments came from the left. Without embracing the progressive critique of the Texas model, some business-oriented conservatives argued that state's tight fiscal policies caused the state to cut corners in areas essential to its future. In 2016, Tom Luce, a prominent Dallas lawyer and former assistant secretary of education under President George W. Bush, founded Texas 2036, a business-backed organization with a mission to identify some of the greatest threats to Texas' future and to seek solutions to those problems. At the time he founded the organization, Luce recognized that Texas faced a serious challenge educating a workforce for the 21st-century economy. By 2036, he noted, the state's much-expanded population would require millions of new jobs, many of which would demand high levels of education and specialized skills. For years, Texas had imported knowledge workers, including computer programmers, engineers and other highly educated employees from other states and foreign countries. Luce and other business leaders argued that the state should do more to prepare its own residents for these types of high-end jobs. Similarly, they contended that Texas should make more strategic investments in other areas, including infrastructure; health care access, affordability and outcomes; resource conservation and use; and modernization of government services. In short, powerful backers of the Texas model made the case that if that model is to succeed over the long run, it must adapt to the changing needs of a swiftly growing and diversifying society.