Revenge of the Suckers…

Mostly I like Paul Krugman – he seems to be one of the few columnists who tries to make sense of economic issues rather than hewing to talking points – and yet this editorial leaves me confused. On the one hand he questions the conventional wisdom that “red state” citizens vote against their economic interests because of trumped up “values” issues. This is an interesting issue, and the statistics he presents do indeed undermine the idea that it’s poor voters voting against their economic interests that fuel GOP victories.

On the other hand he has no reasonable alternative explanation. He obliquely suggests that this is a battle of the elites: evangelicals in red states against … I guess their counterparts in blue states. Hollywood liberals maybe? It’s true that only about 40% of possible voters actually vote, and Krugman thinks that fundamentalists are the important swing constituency even though they represent a relatively small percentage of the population.

Perhaps there’s another explanation. Consider this first map which shows the states that are net winners in the Tax Revenue game in red (pillagers), and the losers in blue (pillaged). This second map shows the states that went Republican in 2004 as red (winners) and Democratic as blue (losers). The two are almost perfectly congruent.

The eight exceptions are Oregon, Hawaii, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Vermont (tax winners electorally blue), and Colorado, Texas, Indiana (tax loser electorally red). It’s not hard to make up ideas about why this 15% of states should buck the trend that for the most part indicates that voters in red states are voting for their economic interests. In the sense that voters in red states get a bigger slice of the tax revenue pie relative to voters in the blue state who get a smaller slice, at least under Republican administrations. If you think about it, voters in blue states get the smaller slice because they are confident that they are right to support the downtrodden in the red states.

In other words, we are being played for suckers.

It’s time to stop that cycle. The so-called “culture-war issues” are just rhetorical tags which help to distinguish those who care more about the welfare of other people from those who care more about themselves and their kin.

Take abortion. Those who support free access to abortion are exactly those people who know that it’s best for the community as a whole for women to exercise autonomy over their reproductive decisions. These are the same people who would put money into public coffers to support poor people, public health, or farm subsidies – exactly the kinds of things that help people in red states. On the other hand those who oppose access to abortion are the same people who would accept public largess and then declare that they are self-made individualists, and that any woman that might be pregnant was an evil slut. Unless of course it was their own daughter in which case they should be allowed to get an abortion, because she’s a good girl. Good for their egos, but false. Look at the map – they are living large on the public dime, and yet their culture says otherwise. They believe in the American dream, and yet they undermine it for others.

What to do about it? I would say do the same thing you do whenever you discover that you have been scammed – that you have been played for a sucker. Get pissed off! Get angry! You have been played, sucka; you are a fool. Are you going to take it? Or do you deal with the problem?

Beyond that I don’t have a solution. I just don’t know, sorry. You could become as bad as the red-staters and only vote for your personal interests, and yet what would that mean? Should we all relegate ourselves to the Lowest Common Denominator? Or is there a higher action we could take that will override anything that the LCD voter will do? I don’t know.

I hope you do. Comments are open.

- jack*