Sidebar: Those Dirty Red States

In March and May of last year I did two posts about what is now being called “Red State Socialism”—showing undeniable evidence that “in essence, the blue states subsidize the red states.” (This was also confirmed as "Mostly True" by PolitiFact) In addition, they have the highest percentage using food stamps, and are statistically less healthy, which could be correlated to being more under-insured than the blue states: they have higher rates of obesity,  diabetes,  heart disease and cancer mortality. They also have the highest rates of smoking.

It seems there’s an inverse correlation between support for Democrats and receiving government largess, as this article in the New York Times reported: (italics added)

But Dean P. Lacy, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation.

Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.

Conversely, states that pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits tend to support Democratic candidates. And Professor Lacy found that the pattern could not be explained by demographics or social issues.

In 2010, Ezra Klein at the Washington Post sums it up this way:

There is a very strong correlation, then, between a state voting for Republicans and receiving more in federal spending than its residents pay to the federal government in taxes (the rust belt and Texas being notable exceptions). In essence, those in blue states are subsidizing those in red states. Both red and blue states appear to be acting politically in opposition to their economic interests. Blue states are voting for candidates who are likely to continue the policies of red state subsidization while red states are voting for candidates who profess a desire to reduce federal spending (and presumably red state subsidization).

The “Rude Pundit” Lee Pappas explains, in his wonderfully acerbic style,  this “phenomena” as follows (February 13):

We see it constantly, the hatefulness without cause, the fear without reason, and, as a New York Times article from this weekend shows, so very much of it is caused a shocking amount of self-loathing. The article looks at self-proclaimed government-hating conservatives who live in small towns near Minneapolis. And however much they hate the debt and the president, nearly all of them receive some sort of federal assistance. There's Ki Gulbranson, the shop owner who "is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice."

Gulbranson can't see giving any of this up, but he doesn't think the government should raise taxes. And he can't stand the idea of debt being passed down to the next generations. "I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government," he said. But neither does he turn it down.

Some conservatives see the social safety net as a calculated plot by liberals to make people dependent on the federal government, a way of controlling them. Of course, since the states where people receive more in government assistance than they pay in taxes vote Republican, that's pretty much demonstrably false.

Perhaps one day people like Gulbranson and Michael will understand that the Americans who harmed them and continue to harm them are the politicians they have supported. And that the people they have spurned are the ones who actually want them to survive and give them help to get by, if they need it. Either way, though, self-loathing, Obama-hating or not, you can bet they'll still keep the cash.

Not only that, studies have shown that, contrary to the conservative belief that the government-paid benefits go to those who are lazy and jobless (and to those who are racist, to minorities), the benefits are actually going to those who are working:

Furthermore, the study notes that politicians have shifted benefits away from the "jobless poor," through reductions in traditional welfare, and increased benefits for working families, for example through tax credits. The government also has steadily expanded eligibility for benefit programs.

"The safety net became much more work-based," wrote Arloc Sherman and his collaborators at the center, a left-leaning research group. "In addition, the U.S. population is aging, which raises the share of benefits going to seniors and people with disabilities."

Another finding of the study is that the distribution of benefits no longer aligns with the demography of poverty. African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the poor, receive 14 percent of government benefits, close to their 12 percent population share.

When one considers the earned income tax credit, people like Ki Gulbranson mentioned above almost pay no tax at all in terms of federal income including the payroll tax. In certain respects he may net more than his total gross income when you take into account all of his government benefits.

Does he think, since he says he doesn’t want government help (yet takes it) that when the day comes for cutting government programs, that he will still have those benefits? In other words, this appears to be that “best of both worlds” mentality I’ve referred to before—“I want it but I don’t want to pay for it.” Somehow a connection needs to be made between the benefits and how much they cost the taxpayers, or that the red state residents are shorting the government and getting more than what they are entitled to.

Sometimes I think the Democrats need to do a sea-change in how they treat government safety net programs. In fact, they may need to become more Republican in their approach. If expanded programs makes the red state inhabitants less supportive, perhaps there should be state block grants for those safety net programs equivalent to the state’s tax contributions. Leave it to the states to divvy it up among the residents, which would force curtailing the same programs (or raising taxes), and let’s see how those red staters feel when they get what they wished for.

If this is too much for Democrats to fathom, then the appropriate noise must be sounded with regard to what the red states are doing. The Occupy movement needs to start a “Blue States Take Back Our Fair Share” or "Occupy [Protest] Subsidizing Red States" off shoot. And don’t be afraid to use the word “Fair”—it almost seems to me that the reason Republicans have made the word fair a dirty word with socialistic implications is because fair is only a bad word when you’re getting the better end, which the Republicans in red states certainly are.

Or, as the Rude Pundit might say, screw them. And keeping that in mind, I need to update my 2011 “Miserable in Mississippi” title, as I found out just what some of them are doing to moderate their misery: Red state Mississippi, it turns out, has the distinction of being Number Three in the U.S. for number of porn subscriptions per 1,000 broadband users—well, I always thought evangelicals were sexually repressed, and this may be proof! Number One is the most interesting (and may prove it even more), however: it’s Mormon state Utah! (Seven of the top ten states for this measure of use of on line pornography were traditionally red states; the three remaining were Florida, which is sort of a fence sitter, and non-continentals very liberal Hawaii and streak-of-libertarian Alaska, which was Number 2.)

And although this is only anecdotal, the answers from commenters in a Yahoo Q&A “Why do the Blue States subsidize the Red” question are a case study in cognitive dissonance. It was an inherently racist blame game: it was the large population of native Americans (such as in Oklahoma and North Dakota), it was because the red states had larger populations of minorities (which has been disproven as I've shown above). One said there were just more poor people in the red states (but that begs the question in regard to Republican economic policies—they must not be working?). One said that in the last ten years of middle east conflicts, it’s been soldiers from red states defending those in the blue (to protest????), but this not only doesn’t follow, he can’t prove it (I know of lots of soldiers who have died in combat from blue state Michgian, so I’m pretty certain that’s not true--I can't find stats by state of Iraq-Afghanistan war casualties).

In other words, no one really had an answer, except for “they (the red states) know how to play the system.” That may be true—and it’s time for a “game change.”