This is certainly not news, but I just can't believe it. I have to take the time to read the entirety of
What's the Matter With Kansas. Here's a chart I made, comparing per capita income with the Presidential vote this election:
I used C-Span's electoral map, along with list of per-capita income per state.
Again, this is not news, but it is pretty mind-boggling. Commentary is below the fold.
We are in a war in Iraq. Poor families are more likely to be sacrificing children in the war.
Bush's tax cuts have gone overwhelmingly to the top earning Americans. My upper-class Manhattanite family got a $16,000 tax rebate. Poor families are getting a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars back.
Rich states and cities like New York have been able to somewhat compensate for lost federal funds by raising municipal taxes to pay for things the feds won't fund anymore. Poor states cannot do that, and Bush will certainly lower federal spending in the next four years. Most blue states are cushioned a bit, but most red states are not.
Rural and poor states receive a large benefit from federal assistance. New Jersey gets back $.57 in federal assistance for every $1 its residents in taxes. New York gets $.80, Illinois gets $.73, and Minnesota gets $.70. But New Mexico got $1.99, Alaska got $1.89, Mississippi got $1.83, Alabama $1.69. Bush is going to have to lower federal spending during this term to pay for his tax cuts. That is going to reduce the amount of money that the blue states pay in de facto welfare to the poor states.
In the next two years or so, the shit is going to hit the fan--both economically, and militarily--and the red staters are going to pay far more than us blue staters. I think it's going to get so bad we have a Nixon-esque outing in which Democrats sweep in 2008.
Part of me wants to say to the red states: "You've made your mess, and now you get to live with it. My parents will take their huge, unneeded tax cut and spend it in New York City, and you can wallow in the spiritual satisfaction of knowing that gays will be constitutionally banned from marrying and Roe vs. Wade is going to be overturned." But that's not productive, and it's unfair to the large number of red state residents who voted for Kerry. As tempting as it is to tell the red states to go fuck themselves, there are a lot of decent people living there (some of whom, I may add, voted for Bush for one reason or another) and they don't deserve to be left out on the curb with the rest of the trash. Furthermore, there are plenty of residents in the blue states who are going to pay in one way or another for Bush's reelection. Lots of blue-staters have died in Iraq. And we were the ones hit on 9/11, which followed months of the Bush administration's criminally negligent refusal to deal with terrorism. If America gets attacked again, you can be it'll be in a blue state.
But the people who did for Bush to "fuckin' kill the terrorists" or to "keep my own money from the lazy poor" or to "stick it to those uppity New Englanders" or to "vote for a regular guy you could have a non-alcoholic beer with" are going to bear the brunt of their mistake. I feel bad for them, but not nearly as bad as I feel for those helpless red state residents who voted sensibly and are stuck with the results of their less sensible neighbors.