Follow The Money

One of the left's more moronic tropes is that the Blue states are net exporters of tax money, while the Red states get more tax money in than they send out.

This, of course, is yet another case where the Democrats need the American people to be too stupid to think for themselves.

It's true - in the sense that "if you line up facts properly, they add up that way, but it's still incredibly misleading".

For starters, per capita incomes in Red states tend to be lower; there's much less income to tax. And as Rocket Man notes on Powerline:

The condition decried by a "top Democrat"--"The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government"--has existed for a long time, courtesy of the progressive income tax, under which a small minority of upper-income taxpayers carry most of the cost of the federal government. Funny, the Dems never minded this before!

Of course, in the lower-income Red states, prices are commensurately lower - so there are fewer expenditures, and less economic activity, to tax. This, of course, is why so many Blue staters are moving to Red states - why Colorado has turned into California East, and formerly-conservative Vermont and New Hampshire have turned into Massachusetts Liberal exile camps.

Beyond that? Western red states tend to be very sparsely populated - still less money to tax - and on top of that, they tend to be full of things like Federal land, military bases and national parks, Native American tribes, hydroelectric projects, water reservoirs and pipelines to feed the major cities - all of which receive tax money, and lots of it, but then I don't hear Los Angeles or New Yorkers bitching too hard about the immense, red-state tax expenditures that keep their faucets gushing.

It's another mark of a party whose desperation is slowly eating away all logic.

Posted by Mitch at November 9, 2004 10:36 AM | TrackBack