State Dept Per CapitaFollow

That was a 12 minute gap, you need to up your typing speed Samira!

Ash,

Giant Corporations also have huge union dues. And guess who's to big to fail, according to Democrats, that's right giant corporations.



Cat,

What was your question?

I'll just repeat the same observation I've made the last handful of times this type of argument has been brought up. Trying to wedge something as complex as the collected factors which affect how a state's citizens tax burden compare to their service consumption into something as simple as "red state" vs "blue state" is pretty darn moronic. I would hope we can all agree that no such simple measurement can tell us that a state is "liberal" or "conservative" in all aspects of politics, and it's kinda fruitless and silly to try anyway. There area host of factors from representation in two different branches of the federal government, specific local economy and industry, representation of parties in state legislature and governor, plus how those representative fit into existing caucus, plus such out of their control things like how the rest of the federal government passes legislation which may affect them.


There's also the whole "per capita" thing. High density population areas cost us massively more total money, but they have massively more people in them too. It's arguably much more efficient to operate social services in a large city than in a collection of small towns and rural areas. Thus, low populations are going to cost more per capita for the exact same relative amount of service. And that's before looking at how factors like farm subsidies, which benefit all of us, and are further benefited by the fact that a tiny fraction of our population farms, are going to end out skewing those calculations even further.

There are far more aspects to this than simply identifying how a state voted in the last presidential election and trying to make some broad statement out of it. That goes both for Varus' argument about state debt and the oft repeated argument about federal cost burden versus taxes.

It's just an example. Don't get too caught up in it. The point is that the nature of the spending and the taxes coming from and going to each state. are going to vary based on conditions having nothing at all to do with how a majority of the people voted in the last election. Trying to make such a correlation is just plain silly.

I didn't provide any in the first place. My point isn't about the specific differences, but merely to observe that there *are* differences in terms of per-capita funding between say farm subsidies going to farming communities and housing subsidies going to urban areas. Or both of those and education subsidies in either location, or welfare payouts, or any of a thousand different types of funding which wont correlate precisely among population lines between two different areas.

My example of farm subsidies wasn't erroneous. Someone in a previous thread just went off on some bizarre tangent while completely missing the point and I didn't feel like following the silliness. Surely, no one's actually arguing that somehow we can assume that based solely on how a state's population voted for president determines the entirety of both how taxes affect that population *and* how spending is doled out?


Cause that would be pretty stupid, wouldn't it?

Even when you agree, you argue.

It's kinda cute.

When Gbaji is proven wrong it just reinforces his argument.

Iowa's one of four states to allow the gays to marry and we have the second lowest per capita debt. We may be on to something here. Once we legalize medicinal marijuana I bet we'll be richer than Nebraska even! And look, we're a swing state! Balance you can believe in.