Ross Douthat’s Flawed Red State-Blue State Model
Ross Douthat’s red state-blue state governing model is no match for Nate Silver’s reasoning abilities:
I like Ross Douthat, the New York Times’s newest regular columnist, but the case he presents today on economic conditions in blue states and red states is misleading. Typical of the piece are claims like these:
Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November.
This is true — states which voted for Barack Obama have higher unemployment rates than those that don’t. In fact, the difference is statistically significant: Obama states have an average of 9.3 percent of their population unemployed at the moment, versus 7.9 percent for McCain states.
The problem is that Douthat is confusing cause and effect. Those states may very well have voted for Barack Obama because they had higher unemployment. Obama blew out McCain in high-unemployment states like Michigan, Oregon and Nevada — states which are normally much more competitive. He won, to much surprise, Indiana and North Carolina, two states with unemployment rates well above the national norms. Indeed, although the Obama states have higher unemployment now, they also did so by a statistically significant margin in November, when Obama was elected.
And yeah, it’s relatively easy to avoid budget gaps if you’re not concerned about the people who fall through those gaps:
Via Ezra Klein
More commentary:
- Paul Krugman points out that “Texas is not the only red state. Why not look at South Carolina, where taxes are almost as low as they are in Texas, but where the unemployment rate is 12.1%? Or Tennessee, which has some of the lowest taxes in the nation, and 11% unemployment?”
- Blue Texan: “[T]he only reason Texas isn’t facing a budget deficit is because Obama’s stimulus bill bailed us out.“
- David Dayen seconds Steve Benen: “Texas is the worst state in America for the uninsured and the second-worst state for poverty rates. To conservatives who judge the progress of a state by the budgetary balance sheet and not the prosperity of the citizenry, I’m sure they are a model citizen.”
Via Memeorandum.
8 Responses to “Ross Douthat’s Flawed Red State-Blue State Model”
The reason to compare Texas to California is they both have the same high level of Hispanic population. Califonria is being crushed trying to give their Hispanic a high level of government services. Texas is not.
The question to ask is what would happen to California is California raises taxes to cover all of the entitlement spending for their Hispanic population
There's much more of interest to compare than economic response to Hispanic populations. California already taxes income at an extreme rate compared to Texas (and compared to most other states). And California is much more highly regulated both environmentally and economically. And California has a direct vote political system (referendums) unlike any other state. Cause and effect? Takes more than a knee jerk to figure it out.
Keelaay,
Texas probably elects more state and local officals than any other state. Texas also has referendum that has caused numerous problems with school funding.
California faces the problem of how does it maintain a liberal, high service welfare state while maintaining race based government programs and maintianing open borders and unlimited immigration. California shows that you cannot.
Detailed Texas unemployment levels:
http://www.localetrends.com/st/tx_texas_unemplo…
versus
Detailed California unemployment levels
http://www.localetrends.com/st/ca_california_un…
It's an easy matter to bypass the lefty distortions again and just make the distinction between current, economic-slump-related matters and long-known structural (and political-economic-cultural) problems long established in the hard-core Blue Nation states, not just in NY and NJ and the Rust Belt industrial area states, but also of course in California and to a less-newsworthy extent in [western, urbanized] Oregon and Washington [whose urban populations dominate politics and policy there], and more quietly in the news (for the region is no longer of paramount importance, arguably also of its own making) New England.
(Is a solution to the long-term prospects or “prognosis” of these places, especially where winters are cold, too, similar to what can cynically be said for Rhode Island, not only gambling but prostitution, with minimum age for adult employment below eighteen?)
* * *
“There's much more of interest to compare than economic response to Hispanic populations.”
The Hispanic trend in Cailfornia and the rest of the Southwest is the pro-Democratic factor, a growth of a pro-Democratic group (which the GOP tries to poach, and fails). The anti-success factors are the things you list as well, the anti-business and worse, “Massachusetts Lite” destructive as well as often silly liberal politics that has been coming out of Sacramento (and out of county and city governments as well) for decades, causing a job loss and brain drain among those of us who were natives driven away due to these as well as other matters (taxes, cost of living, crowding, crime — not same as growing-up years).
Actually, Super D., California remains the paramount state in the union not only in size but as the forefront of modern liberal politics (frequently displacing New York and New Jersey in importance). Back in the 1970s, when there was still a larger measure of centering on the Northeast (and conceit there) than there is now, New York state (the neglected part of the picture) and New York City (the crown jewel, the pinnacle, of US liberalism, on proud and arrogant display) was where the failure and bankrupcy made news. “Too big [government] to succeed,” eventually. California has been moving this way for ages.
Aid to states (and maybe even to cities, a modern version of the Sixties “urban policy” follies) will likely be a more, not less, important topic in the months to come, not only because of California's and other Blue states' legacy to date of mismanagement, but because states are likely to hurt more, not less, once unemployment benefits expire and credit cards and loans of individuals face the likely later collapse.
And Blue states are likely to be favored by aid programs, as well as to vote Democratic in anticipation of it.
Super D.: Assuming you may live (still) in California, note the other problems, such as this (which involves systemic failure in California's prison system as well as a wrongly intrusive federal judiciary):
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/08/j…
California, in particular, should prove an interesting case if it goes bankrupt or gets bailed out by Washington.
I'm intrigued at the possibilities not only with state but with local (municipal) bankruptcies, such as with Detroit where I currently am. While union people in Detroit choose to be blissfully ignorant and openly in denial of the possibility in Detroit of city or school-district bankruptcy (“Obama will never permit that to happen; he knows we're too important to be allowed to fail” is the line of reasoning openly expressed), the possibility of municipal failures and going into state or some new form of federal receivership (what state of affairs is Los Angeles in these days, by the way?) and state failures and federal receivership raises a lot of questions and issues. (I still say that bankrupt states should be demoted to territorial status if they are put into federal receivership and bailout conditions.)
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