The new GOP majority in the Minnesota House of Representatives is going to try to capitalize on the red/blue, rural/urban divide down which the votes broke last month.
This is a mixed bag of good and bad – more about that later today – but we had a little blast from the past in the reporting on the subject.
One of the left favorite mediums in discussing America’s culture war is one floated most famously by the loathsome Paul Krugman in the middle of the last decade – The idea that Blue America pays more taxes, and Red America is a net consumer of government, taxpayer paid aid.
Krugman’s thesis ignores a lot of inconvenience details; the effect that massive amounts of federal land and military bases in sparsely populated states has on calculating net government “aid” (as if the wing of B1 bombers in North Dakota are as good as cash in the pocket for the locals), to say nothing of the distorting affected the sheer numbers in the various farm bills. Not to mention the fact that blue America has higher per capita income (not to mention cost-of-living); suddenly, Paul Krugman opposes progressive taxation?
In reporting on the Minnesota GOP’s new tack, Minnesota public radio Tim Pugmire notes:
The latest numbers from the nonpartisan Minnesota House Research Department show the seven-county metro area pays 64 percent of the state’s taxes and gets back 53 percent of the major tax aids, credits and refunds. By comparison, the 80 non-metro counties pay 36 percent and get back 47 percent.
seems like a pretty cut and dried number, right?
So how much of that disparity was a result of road and farm spending in sparsely populated counties?
How much stems from the state’s decades of spending truckloads of money on the iron Range, where the standard of living and per capita income is relatively low, but state spending is extremely high?
Or from the significant disparity in income and cost-of-living between the Twin Cities and the rest of the state?
What might be a more useful comparison; compare different types of spending per capita between the Metro and greater Minnesota: The metro might be getting pretty seriously shorted on agriculture spending – but I’m going to guess the per capita transportation spending has shifted greatly towards the metro in recent years.
The point? Like Paul Krugman’s misleading black and white comparison of two numbers, the real story is a lot more complicated than the media is showing you.
I live in bluer-than-blue Hawaii. We get over $3 in federal spending for every buck we send to DC.
Thanks!
Leftists squirting tears about re-distribution. Heh.
Most of the states on the very top of the Federal largesse list are very poor. Loiusiana, Alabama, etc. They were also very poor back when the Dem’s ran them.
Then there is that whole ‘correlation is not causation’ thing. The poorest countries in the world are far to the left of the US government. What does it mean? Who knows?
Mitch: you are probably looking at the wrong areas of the budget. Ag and transportation just don’t have enough $s to explain the difference. Ag is less than 1% and transportation only 10% of the budget. Education (30%) and healthcare (42%) are where the real $s are.
If greater MN has an older & lower income population that the Metro, it will likely get more $s for nursing homes and home care and more $s for MA and MN Care.
It would be interesting to see the rural-suburban-urban breakdown.
When I last lived in Minneapolis (late 70s) there was still a good mix of demographics, small businesses (retail and industrial), and big businesses (though most of the biggies were in Bloomington). Lately, when I’ve gone back, it seems like there are a lot of rich people, a lot of poor people, a lot of government offices and boutique shops, but not what you’d call a good, mixed economy and population.
pm
when I moved to Mpls 45 years ago it was as you describe it a good mix of demographics and places like Phillips, the north side and central were good largely friendly transitional neighborhoods where you could safely reside while working your way into better circumstances – not anymore now they are stopping points that you are not expected or encouraged to escape. 45 years of Democratic Party Rule and they have become festering swamps of hatred and deviance.
To change this….break up the Indian Reservations. They are in red areas. Privatize state and federal parks. Imagine the tax income Yellowstone or Jay Cooke would bring in.
But the big picture in this argument is that liberals want more tax money to be spent on the rich blues area, and to cut benefits to poorer red areas. Tax the poor, give tax breaks to the rich?
Cesaire, Maybe a decade ago I ran into a an old friend from my MN days. He was in the tech business, and he said that he had considered expanding his business in Columbia Heights because the building was cheap. The problem was that the parking lot was in Minneapolis, and if he took ownership he would have had to spend a fortune upgrading the parking lot drainage to comply with Minneapolis’s zoning laws. He went to Eden Prairie instead.
Any comparison of metro vs rural dollars has to include how much matching funds come from the federal government. Light rail advocates always defend the costs by saying that only a portion comes from the state- but tax dollars are tax dollars.
Let’s hope they provide enough meaningful work product to be re-elected in 2016.