January 30, 2004
NOW THAT'S THE WAY TO BUY VOTES:
Givers and Takers (DANIEL H. PINK, 1/30/04, NY Times)
Each year, the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit research group, crunches numbers from the Census Bureau to produce an intriguing figure: how much each state receives in federal spending for every dollar it pays in federal taxes.For example, according to the most recent data, for every dollar the average North Dakotan paid in federal taxes, he received $2.07 in federal benefits. But while someone in Fargo was doubling his money, his counterpart in neighboring Minnesota was being shortchanged. For every dollar Minnesotans sent to Washington, only 77 cents in federal spending flowed back to the state.
Using the Tax Foundation's analysis, it's possible to group the 50 states into two categories: Givers and Takers. Giver states get back less than a dollar in spending for every dollar they contribute to federal coffers. Taker states pocket more than a dollar for every tax dollar they send to Washington. Thirty-three states are Takers; 16 are Givers. (One state, Indiana, has a perfect one-to-one ratio of taxes paid and spending received. As seat of the federal government, the District of Columbia has no choice but to be a Taker, and is therefore not comparable to the 50 states in this regard.)
The Democrats' electability predicament comes into focus when you compare the map of Giver and Taker states with the well-worn electoral map of red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states. You might expect that in the 2000 presidential election, Republicans, the party of low taxes and limited government, would have carried the Giver states — while Democrats, the party of wild spending and wooly bureaucracy, would have appealed to the Taker states. But it was the reverse. George W. Bush was the candidate of the Taker states. Al Gore was the candidate of the Giver states.
Easy enough to correct the imbalance: elect Republicans to Congress from the Blue states. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 30, 2004 7:53 PM
I guess it takes the Times to believe the explanatory variable(s) behind the "givers" vs. "takers" analysis is just whether they are "blue" or "red" states.
However, if they do want to fix this "problem", and they don't want to folow oj's advice, here is another one: Enact a flat tax on income (if you can't get yourself to enact a regressive schedule).
Posted by: MG at January 30, 2004 8:10 PMAs usual, the data shows that Republicans are the evil scheming greedy people, at least in the minds of the NYT. ...Of course, one could explain the data in a different way: Republicans are voting as they do not for personal reasons but for their own ethical principles. (After all, it seems like voting for smaller government should *hurt* them; they clearly aren't voting in their own self-interest.) Or, perhaps, having seen what government largesse does for its recipients, they know to vote against it. Most likely there's a complicated set of reasons involved, and some common causes for which both of these are effects. Correlation does not imply causation, unless it helps the Democrat party line.
Posted by: Dave at January 30, 2004 8:39 PMDave -
Is actually likely to be very simple, and a Democratic creation:
Blue states are wealthier; income taxes are very progressive; thus they pay more taxes. Red states are poorer; transfer payments are suppose to go to the poorer; thus they get more in spending.
Posted by: MG at January 30, 2004 10:22 PMI don't see why MG's explanation is supposed to reflect poorly on the Democrats. In fact, if it's a "Democratic creation" that we are so productive in the blue states, at whose door can we lay the pervasive social pathology of the red staters?
On the other hand, this certainly explains why the GOP has lost its taste for small government. Why alienate the clientele?
Posted by: Charlie Murtaugh at January 30, 2004 10:55 PMAnother possibility is that the map of "givers and takers" would more closely reflect the relationship between the states whose congresscritters are from the majority party (takers) and minority party (givers). Easy enough to test-- how did it look in 1990 or 1980?
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at January 30, 2004 11:01 PMIt's incumbency, not party affiliation that determines which states get what. And yes, Pink provided no historical data because that would have shown an ebb and flow to the party/taker ratio. Very dishonest, partisan piece.
Posted by: Jim Gooding at January 31, 2004 9:02 AMCharlie -
The explanation is supposed to reflect poorly on the Times, whose "analysis" is not only simplistic but hypocritical -- in that misses the point that the party/philosophies they like may be at the crux of this inequity.
I am not sure why you think that the tax and spend culture of which Dems are STILL the biggest exponent is at the crux of explaining the distribution of wealth in America. First, both the gap between and the "political color" of the states is a moving variable. Sure, blue states today are wealthier than red staes (as an approximation). But the gap between them has been narrowing and was bigger when today's blue states were red states and vice versa (think NJ, NY, CA, PA, IL vs SC, NC, NV, AL, FL). So why not: Republicanism is an essential political philosophy when you are building wealth; Democratism when you are dissipating it or exporting it.
Posted by: MG at January 31, 2004 10:19 AMIt's common for prejudice against a minority group to be stronger in areas where the members of the minority group live. It's not surprising that areas with rich people have lots of Democrats.
Posted by: Joseph Hertzlinger at January 31, 2004 11:31 PM