[Note from MeanMesa: While there has plenty written about the calamitous times we inhabit, this article from PoliticusUSA offers an unusually thoughtful view of our situation.]
Under Trump, Red States Are About to Become Low-Wage, Low Health Hell Holes
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Under Trump, Red states are about to become hell holes. Think Kansas.
Or, as the Wonkblog’s Steven Pearlstein puts it, “red states are finally going to be able to turn themselves into poor, unhealthy paradises.”
Because Trump’s economic plans are not going to make America great again, but they are going to make living in a blue state great again. Because Democratic-controlled states will finally be rid of the red-state “socialist moochers.”
As Pearlstein preaches to the already converted (conservatives won’t see this because of restrictions imposed by confirmation bias),
Data compiled by the Pew Charitable Trust found that 10 states that receive less than a dollar back for every dollar they send to Washington: Delaware, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. And here are the states that get more than $2 back for every $1 in taxes paid: Mississippi, New Mexico, West Virginia, Hawaii, South Carolina, Alabama, Maine, Montana, Alaska, Virginia, Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky and Vermont. You don’t have to be a political scientist to see the blue state/red state pattern here. Red state voters may talk a good game about small government and low taxes, but in reality they are socialist moochers.
Here’s the beauty of it for Blue states:
After all, if Republicans cut taxes — in particular, taxes on investment income — then the biggest winners are going to be the residents of Democratic states where incomes, and thus income taxes, are significantly higher. Governors and legislatures in those states — home to roughly half of all Americans — will now have the financial and headroom to raise state income and business taxes by as much as the federal government cuts them — and use the additional revenue to replace all the federal services and benefits that Republicans have vowed to cut.
In other words, they can “maintain the Obamacare insurance exchanges, the low-income subsidies and the expansion of the Medicaid program.” The only states that need to suffer under a Trump administration are Red states, and we poor Democrats who happen to live in them.
And as Pearlstein adds, “The additional state revenue could also be used to replace cuts in federal funding for public schools, or food stamps, or public transit subsidies.”
Sounds good, doesn’t it? So should the idea that “there should even be money left over to invest in public college and university systems” so despised and underfunded by Republicans. So yes, as Pearlstein promises, “Now Democrats could demonstrate that their cherished 10th Amendment can be a sword that cuts both ways,” and,
“[B]lue state Democrats could look forward to the satisfaction of watching Trump’s voters stew in their own political juices as Red State America finally frees itself from the evil grip of global elites and big government and turns itself into a low-tax, low-wage, low health paradise where it’s every man for himself.”
And that is, after all, what Republicans want most, a return to the state of nature where, a place populated by well-armed Anglo-Saxon individualists. A place where, as the great Thomas Hobbes said even before Ayn Rand drew breath, the “dissolute condition of masterlesse men, without subjection to Lawes, and a coercive Power to tye their hands from rapine, and revenge,” will render “the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
And Trump will lead the charge.
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