Why Do Red States Object to the Stimulus? They Pig Out at the Federal Trough & Do Not Want to Share!

McCamy Taylor

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Wed Feb-25-09 11:25 PM
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Why Do Red States Object to the Stimulus? They Pig Out at the Federal Trough & Do Not Want to Share!

Edited on Wed Feb-25-09 11:31 PM by McCamy Taylor

I. Author, Author!

The truism du jour among conservatives is that the text of Governor Bobby Jindal�s rebuttal of President�s Obama speech before Congress was better than his delivery. Since my cats have coughed up hairballs that were better than Jindal�s delivery, I can not argue with that. However, that does not make the text good. Or accurate.

Take this line, repeated in substance a couple of times.

Democratic leaders in Washington, they place their hope in the federal government. We place our hope in you, the American people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/us/politics/24jindal-text.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

This reminds me of a famous line from Tennessee Williams, uttered by a woman of dubious morality and confirmed insanity.

Blanche DuBois�I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers�
A Streetcar Named Desire

Gratuitous photo of Vivian Leigh, because who would you rather look at? Her or Bobby Jindal?

The same character said:

Blanche DuBois: �I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.�
A Streetcar Named Desire

Jindal�s speech was full of fictional content. That whole anecdote about Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine was the very epitome of a Cajun story�a tale which serves no purpose except to confuse the audience. Does this mean that it was written by someone channeling Tennessee Williams, as a joke on the Republican party? Or was it meant to conceal a secret?

II. Red States Have Always Depended Upon the Kindness of the American People

Red States pride themselves on keeping their taxes low. They suppress state and local taxes in order to encourage companies and rich folks to relocate to their states. They keep an unhealthy supply of low wage, under educated, uninsured (often undocumented) workers so that there are plenty of maids, nannies, lawn care workers. This also allows the businesses to keep costs down so CEOs have lots of cash to bribe state officials . The side effect is rampant poverty, lack of health insurance, reduced tax base which leads to poor performing schools and other social ills that accompany wealth disparity. They deal with the inevitable consequences of their broken business model, by taking more than their share from the federal government coffers.

That�s right. These self styled, conservative, pull themselves up by their boot strap, we don�t believe in big federal government Republicans rake in more federal dollars than they give back in taxes. They fine tune their social safety net to keep just enough people alive and breathing to fill their federally funded prisons and dig their federally funded roads and pad the payroll on any other pork they can bring home to help deal with the poverty problem that they have deliberately engineered---because there is money to be made in the misfortune of others.

Well, no wonder they are objecting so strenuously to the Stimulus Bill that is going to give some extra federal funds to the other states in this time of recession/Depression. The Red states have worked hard to socially engineer misery so that they can make profit off of it. They do not want to share their good thing with some Johnny-Come-Latelys who just accidentally developed a problem with rising unemployment and poverty.

Those Red states sure appreciate the kindness of the American people who give them all their hard earned tax money to help them out when they are in trouble---but don�t expect the same favor in return. The Republicans taketh---and they taketh.

It is always sort of sad when you realize that people who talk all high and mighty about their principles are just making up shit to justify old fashioned self interest. But that is what this �limited federal government� crap is about. A bunch of greedy Red states want to cut the federal government back down to a size where it is just big enough to keep giving handouts to Mississippi and Louisiana and Kentucky and a few non southern states like both Dakotas---

But don�t take my word for it.

III. Numbers Don�t Lie.

Examine these statistics from 2005, before we plunged into recession. The figures on the right show how much return states get on their tax investment. The higher the number, the more money the states are getting back from Washington.

http://www.nemw.org/taxburd.htm

In order, the states that get the biggest return on their investment are: Mississippi (gets a 100% return on its money!), New Mexico, Alaska, West Virginia, Louisiana, Virginia, Alabama, North Dakota, Kentucky, Texas (but they are swimming in oil money and have no state income tax and the people pay the lowest per capita tax in the nation!), South Dakota, Montana, Hawaii, Arkansas, Maine, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas----

Now compare this to how the states voted in 2004. Only Hawaii, Maine, Maryland voted for Kerry.

In 2008, only New Mexico, Virginia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, North Carolina voted for Obama.

I don�t know about you, but this just does not seem to add up. Conservatives claim that Democrats are tax and spend liberals. They say that we bleed hard working Americans dry and give the money to Welfare Queens in the inner city of Chicago so that they can eat steak and drive Cadillacs. But Illinois only gets back � of its investment from the feds. You hear that Mitch McConnell? Your state makes a 50% return on its investment and gives the country lung cancer, heart disease, stroke from its tobacco crop. Those diseases cost us billions of dollars. The suffering they cause can not be measured in numbers. However, McConnell will do his damnedest to make sure that the federal government pays his state to support its tobacco industry, because he is a conservative who does not believe in Big Government .

IV. One True Thing

Recently, some one wrote to the Fort Worth Star Telegram. He bragged about how many degrees he had then said that people�s vote should be proportional to how much tax they pay. Under his system, the Red states should have no say in how the country is run, since they owe a big debt to the Blue states. Ideally, they should shut up and let President Obama and the Congressional Democrats fix the mess which Bush and the Republican Congress created in their unbridled greed.

I can just picture the alarm on the face of Rush Limbaugh.

However, Jindal said We place our hope in you, the American people. Now, he may not have meant it. Nothing scares a Republican more than two or more people exercising their rights as citizens of a democracy. But he said it. Several times. On national television. He uttered a plea for help. And we all know that Louisiana, bastard child of the Republican party, cursed, scorned and left to die, needs help more than any other Red state.

On September 18, 2006, Pastor John Hagee � whose endorsement Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said this past Sunday he was �glad to have� � told NPR�s Terry Gross that �Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.� �New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God,� Hagee said, because �there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came.�

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/23/hagee-katrina-mccain/

The Republicans represent a small number of special interests, like bank CEOs and Dick Cheney, who think that it makes good business sense to take the money and run to Dubai Ports. They sucker some other special interests, like extreme religious groups and bigots into voting against their financial interests by promising that they will pass unconstitutional legislation which they never deliver. These extremists turn out to vote in unusually high numbers, and they are willing to break the law to disenfranchise Democrats. The rich spend a lot of money buying TV time and journalists to sway the opinion of �independents� who are not well informed. That is how Republicans win elections despite their low numbers.

The Democrats represent everyone else---you know, the American people. And luckily, Americans believe in helping out other Americans who are less fortunate than themselves. They understand that a strong economy depends upon a strong employed working class that has purchasing power and the ability to educate its children and prepare them for the future. That is why the majority of Americans voted for the Democrats in the last election

Blue state Democrats have no patience with Red state Republicans who say Give us the highway money so we can line the pockets of our brother-in-laws, but keep the unemployment money. We like the starving workers. They will help us build those roads for half the cost and let us pocket the rest.

Bad Red state Republicans. Stupid Red state Republicans. That is not what the stimulus is for. Your federal welfare for the rich is what got us into this mess. Your war in Iraq bled the coffers dry so that you could skim a few billion off the top for your companies---any economics major who presented an idea like that as a thesis would get an F. Go to the back of the class and let the people who actually make the wealth that makes this country strong take charge, the real hard working men and women of America.

Bobby Jindal said one true thing, even if he did not mean it. He can place his hope in the American people. We will help his state, even if he is a Republican. We will not let him sink into the ocean, because he spoke against Obama, the way that Rove let NOLA sink, because they held a Jazz Funeral for Democracy in January 2005.

The American people know that we all have to hang together or we will hang separately. And hanging together means offering the workers in Red states the same opportunities for education, health care, decent wages, decent work conditions that their Blue state counterparts already have. The result will be a sounder economy, with fewer states that have to drain the federal coffers to get by and more that pull their own weight. Which is supposed to be what conservatives are all about, right?