{"id":5063,"date":"2009-07-09T08:11:54","date_gmt":"2009-07-09T13:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5063"},"modified":"2009-07-09T08:11:54","modified_gmt":"2009-07-09T13:11:54","slug":"hope-and-swag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5063","title":{"rendered":"Hope And Swag"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After the 2004 campaign, Paul Krugman &#8211; the most overrated economist in history &#8211; posted a famous column in which he claimed that &#8220;red&#8221; states got more tax benefits than he paid out.<\/p>\n<p>Like the dutiful trained chimps that most of them are, leftybloggers have been uncritically repeating this slur for the past five years, ignoring the fact that Krugman &#8211; being more motivated by politics than fact &#8211; omitted some key facts; western states have immense proportions of federally owned land, and lots of military bases, which are certainly &#8220;tax inflows&#8221;, but hardly direct entitlements.\u00a0 Of course, western farm states get plenty in farm program subsidies &#8211; and conservatives have been fighting against these since, roughly, they started.\u00a0 Krugman also neglected to note that per-capita incomes are much lower in the same states that he slurred &#8211; which means the trained-chimp leftybloggers have been unwittingly protesting <em>against <\/em>progressive income taxation, not that most of them are bright enough to know it.<\/p>\n<p>How does non-farm <em>entitlement <\/em>spending break down?\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know &#8211; yet.<\/p>\n<p>But we <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/washington\/2009-07-08-redblue_N.htm\">have a hint, here<\/a>; counties that backed Obama get twice as much &#8220;Stimulus&#8221; money per capita as red counties:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration&#8217;s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows. That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college.<br \/>\nThe reports show the 872 counties that supported Obama received about $69 per person, on average. The 2,234 that supported McCain received about $34.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, I suppose loyalty is a good trait &#8211; right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After the 2004 campaign, Paul Krugman &#8211; the most overrated economist in history &#8211; posted a famous column in which he claimed that &#8220;red&#8221; states got more tax benefits than he paid out. Like the dutiful trained chimps that most of them are, leftybloggers have been uncritically repeating this slur for the past five years, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}