TheAgitator.com
Red and Blue Review
Thursday, June 12th, 2003Lefty blogger Atrios cites this Tax Foundation table to toss out the snarky line, “most Bush-voting states are sucking at the federal teat.” He also labels states that pay out more to the federal government than they take in as “net contributors to the rest of the country.”
That’s one way of putting it.
Atrios ought to know better. The mere fact that “red” states lead “blue” states in federal taxes spent vs. federal dollars returned says nothing about whether the citizens of either are rational (or hypocritical) voters.
You could make the case, for example, that every dollar that trickles from the federal government to the states comes with a mandate. Often times, the dollars are revoked, but the mandates remain. Great example: federal highway funding, and all the extras (HOV lanes, seat belt laws, BAC thresholds, etc.) now tied to it.
I’d submit that blue states like sending big government candidates to Washington because it allows them to impose their politics on the rest of the country. If Connecticut liberals want a gun-free community with abortion on demand, they can enact laws on a local level to create just such a community.
But they want more than that. As Paul Begala’s post 2000 election screed that made the blue state/red state map iconographic revealed, blue state liberals don’t just disagree with red state conservatives, they hate them. They’d like nothing better than to take away every Montanan’s gun rack, put his daughter on birth control, and force him to drive a hbyrid car at 35 mph with a radio tuned to NPR. It’s a sort of ideological imperialism.
When red-staters talk about blue states, they say things like “New York’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” When blue-staters talk about red states, they say things like Begala wrote — they point out that red states are places where Matthew Shepherd and James Byrd get beaten and lyched by inbred knuckle-draggers. Red states aren’t just flyover country. They’re places that need to be conquered. They are, to borrow from Kipling, the blueblood’s burden.
As for Atrios’ attempt to toss hypocrisy off on red-staters, you simply can’t hold red state residents accountable for benefits from federal programs they didn’t vote for.
Sure, lots of federal money comes with the fact that the federal government owns about 70% of the land of Utah. Anybody think Utahans are happy about that?
Sure, Texas cattlemen get beef subsidies. I’ll blame them for not returning those checks as soon as all the Hollywood liberals return the tax cuts they get from Republican politicians they didn’t vote for.
Red-staters I’m sure would glady return the federal largesse they get from Washington if they could return the mandates that came with it. Blue staters are happy to pay more than they take because it allows them to make the rest of the country as enlightened, open-minded and worldly as they are.
Red staters want Washington to leave them alone. Blue staters want Washington to make the rest of the country look more like the blue states.
UPDATE: Um…OK. This post didn’t quite achieve its intended effect. My aim was to exaggerate and overgeneralize the blue state/red state thing the same way the left does (Atrios and Begala, for example). Meaning most of it was meant to be taken with a bit of sarcasm.
Living in far north Texas (North Dakota), I can tell you there is a whole lot of hypocrisy about farm subsidies. Here people tend to vote Republican for executive offices and Democratic for legislative ones. Secure in the polls, our two Democratic Senators, Dorgan and Conrad, do all sorts of sordid trade-offs to keep the rural goodies coming. IMO, this perverse farm-and-city alliance is one of the principal unseen engines of big government.
BTW, to the best of my recollection, many years ago, when color TV was young, Democratic states were shown in red and Republican in blue. Perhaps influential people were bothered by such apt symbolism. The colors very quietly reversed.
Never mind the FACT that the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court are all controlled by representatives of those states, it is still the blue states that somehow mysteriously manages to spend the money…
Where did this come from ? If you wanted to hate on Blue states just do it but don’t act like all the “red - blue hostility” is coming from the coasts. Have you ever been to a red state (Arlington VA doesn’t count)? As someone who is from and lives in the Red but Colleged in the blue let me say two things: Neither is homogenous, plenty of people in the red states have love for the blue states and vice versa, but as far as hatred goes there is certainly more of it coming from the heartland towards the coasts. Your “nice place to visit” line is exactly reversed. What a load of pandering. What’s next: them Hollywood liberals think they’re better than us ?
This whole argument is pretty irrational: Yeah they get more than they give, but I bet they would give it back if they could. And it’s either decptive or ignorant to argue that Texans aren’t voting for the people who are sending them cattle subsidies.
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Hey Radley, look at the D.C. numbers. They get roughly 5 times the money from the federal goverment that they bring in. That puts an interesting wrinkle in your “taxation with representation” tirade. If you want to get rid of taxes in D.C., wouldn’t it make sense for you to give up the welfare as well?
I think that these stats improperly homogenize the voters of a given state. Consider the following made-up scenario: In South Dakota, 1000 wealthy agribusiness types get a million dollars each, and the other half million in the state gets nothing = $500/person, and most people vote for tax cuts. In Vermont, every resident gets a $400 NEA grant to make tie-dyed pottery and votes to keep the money coming.
Two things:
(1) Begala’s red state blanket generalization was intended as a deliberately absurd response to Mike Barnicle’s foolish generalizatiion of blue states. Whereas Barnicle meant to stigmatize blue states, Begala was pointing out how absurd it is to generalize an entire geographic region based on isolated incidents. This is perfectly clear from watching Barnicle, followed by Begala. Yet conservatives(and libertarians, I guess) still hold onto your spin of the tale. I guess more fodder for the ol’ “librul media”
2. The blue state/red state dichotomy was propelled by the right, in an attempt to minimize the lack of popular support for Bush during the election. I think if you go back to year 2000, you will find that it was the conservative punditocracy and the Bush campaign that initiated the whole blue/red discussion. After all, it was in thier best interest to do so. So I fail to see how the left is to blame for purportedly exaggerating this distinction when the right forced the subject onto the electorate. I dunno, maybe I should check out more NRO online to get a better read of the matter.
Even as snarkiness, this was not your best post. But it does demonstrate quite nicely the ongoing bafflement that liberals have with libertarians’ association with the Republican party.
Tax-cutting is easy. Program-cutting costs you votes. Given how evenly split the country is between the parties, and the really remarkable level of vitriol in Washington since the Clinton years, did libertarians really expect the GOP to make hard choices? For gods sake, non-military discretionary spending is going UP, even factoring in Homeland Security costs.
So, what’s more offensive to your libertarian philosophy: higher taxes and a balanced budget, or lower taxes and a massive deficit? remember, there is no option c.
As to the red/blue distribution of federal expenditures, you can thank your senator. Low population states wield utterly disproportionate power in the Senate. Until the Dakotas become one state, and Wyoming is folded into Montana (etc.) or until enough Californians move to the “new West”, the low pop/low density states will continue to have their mythos of the west, and vote GOP, but have disproportionate power, and get net federal dollars.
what i find really amusing is to go to the more GOP-oriented right-wing blogs (like Tacitus or Balloon Juice) and find arguments for cutting ag. subsidies. The publishers and posters seem to forget who put their candidate in the White House.
but as to this line of yours: “Red-staters I’m sure would glady return the federal largesse they get from Washington if they could return the mandates that came with it”, that is one of the dumbest and most inaccurate things you’ve ever written here. Most federal dollars come in block grants, with mandates attached to the grants. No grant; no mandate.
{sarcasm} I bet you were shocked, SHOCKED to discover that Montana and Vermont will willing to raise the legal drinking age a few years back to get federal highways dollars. Why, they BETRAYED their individualistic anti-federal principles. {end sarcasm}
but at the end of the day, it is kind of ironic that the most hardline GOP states tend to be those that also get the largest federal payments, in terms of federal taxes paid.
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