Flutterby™! : Commies in middle America 2008-10-31 13:15:44.587817+00

Commies in middle America

2008-10-31 13:15:44.587817+00 by Dan Lyke 10 comments

Anyone remember when "Better dead than Red" was the rallying cry in the conservative areas of the country? When self-reliance and self sufficiency were the rallying cry among those who called themselves Americans? No longer.

If you have trouble reading that, it means that, for instance, every dollar that Oregonians pay in Federal Taxes, they only get back $0.93. That extra $0.07 goes to Utah where they get $1.07 from the Federal Government for every dollar they pay.

In a nutshell, the Blue States are paying for the Red States' "self-reliance and self-sufficiency".

#Comment Re: made: 2008-10-31 14:29:39.670906+00 by: JT [edit history]

Nice to see Cali having the $1.00 spent to $0.78 received ratio. I've heard a lot of people complain about the amount of money we get from the feds, but I didn't really think it was that way. Seems Californians pay a lot more federal taxes than we think we do.

edit: I've also heard people complain that Alaska was the worst, but it seems they're a couple of spots above "worst" (not that it's any consolation)

I can't find the entry right now, but we had a conversation a while back about a similar data set, and wondered whether it included things like military spending per state. The link that the data came from doesn't seem to provide more clues, so I'd love to see more info on how they came up with those numbers.

I was wondering about Utah - a couple big military sites and lots of national parks. Divide that by a very small population and you get a skewed result.

Maybe a more interesting comparison would be to restrict the federal expenditures to social programs. Of course, you really can't separate military from social despite what George Bush thinks.

Yeah, when lobbying to get military bases and defense contracts is as huge as it is, it's impossible to say that military spending isn't spending on social programs.

I grew up, in the US, with fully socialized heatlh care and housing. I never paid a dime when I went to the hospital - not even for prescriptions. All I had to do was show my "National ID Card". My family always had decent, government-paid housing. It was never fantastic but we were always warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer. We never had leaks in our ceilings. We had skunks under the house once and the housing people were out the day we reported it to capture the critters.

Socialism has always been alive and well in America - just confined to the most conservative venues.

I'm sure many people would like the military benefits. What they don't want is the price paid: getting shot at by people a lot.

Not quite on topic, but yeah, people on both sides are becoming entitlement whores.

It sounds to me like she feels she should be less worried about the future... I don't think that's an entitlement issue. Seems to me that a bit of creative editing was used and that her statement is being construed completely out of context.

Petronius: Not to denigrate my father's career, but he was a jet engine mechanic. The closest he ever came to battle was Thailand during the Vietnam War. As he likes to say: "The Air Force is the only sane branch of the military. They only send their officers to the front lines!"

The military is much more than guys running around with guns and dodging bullets.