Are red or blue states better?

 From Applied Sentience

Source: Applied Sentience

In comparing the quality of life between Red vs Blue states, I’ll be grouping all 23 indicators into 4 main categories:

• 4 Crimes Indicators,
• 4 Social Indicators,
• 7 Health Indicators
• 8 Economic Indicators.
• Plus the Research Methodology
• And the Summary of All 23 Indicators

Intro Comments

As with every other indicator in this study, all of the data collected comes from official government sources and not potentially liberal universities, think tanks, etc.  Specifically, the Bureau of Econ Analysis at the Dep of Commerce (GDP per Capita), the US Census (Median Income, HS Graduation, College Graduation), the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Dep of Labor (Unemployment), the Dep of Agriculture (All Poverty, Child Poverty), and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (Homelessness).  All data sets are the most recent I could find, and from 2018 or 2019, except for the two graduation rates (2017).

If you have any questions about purchasing power parity, what year $$’s are bench-marked at, real vs nominal figures, etc etc, then please check out the respective data sets linked to in this Excel document on Economic Indicators.  Since this is just a personal side project I’m doing for fun, I decided to defer to whatever that gov agency decided was the best to collect and present that stat when comparing states.

One interesting indicator that was ultimately rejected was 1) a State Gov’s Federal Dependency, ie funding per capita a state receives from the national government.  In some recent debates, states that take the most money are, in a twist of the common phrase, “welfare states.”  However, I couldn’t find direct gov stats, only third party studies (which themselves used such stats).  Similarly, I couldn’t find anything about per capita welfare program participation, except for 2) Food Stamps.  I rejected using this since I didn’t want to be seen as cherry picking this particular program.  Both Indicators are analyzed in the Controversial Indicators post (not yet up).

Note: A political party can do “vastly,” “clearly,” or “slightly” better.

GDP per Capita  –  Democrats do Vastly Better

Median Household Income – Democrats do Vastly Better

Unemployment  –  Democrats do Slightly Better

All People in Poverty  –  Democrats do Vastly Better

Child Poverty  –  Democrats do Vastly Better

Pop Graduated HS  –  Democrats do Slightly Better

Pop Graduated College  –  Democrats do Vastly Better

Homelessness – Republicans do Vastly Better

[Read the rest of the article here]

What I find especially interesting about this analysis is that the poorer States are right-wing.  In the rest of the world, the poor support left-wing parties.  In America, the poor vote for the Republican Party.  Some of that has to do with religion, as the book Deer Hunting with Jesus so cleverly shows.  Some with the resilient but (these days) inaccurate belief that everybody in America can escape poverty if only you work hard enough.  What it means, though, it that the Republican Party is a coalition of the rural precariat and the rich who prey on them.  

One of the reasons America is so strange to outsiders is this bizarre nexus.  Another is the extreme inequality not just within the States, but between them, too.  And the rich keep in power by frightening the (white) poor with bogeymen:  Mexicans, Blacks, "liberals", "elites", "gays", the ungodly; and by dragging people to vote for them using single-issue triggers, like gay marriage, abortion, critical race theory, immigration.  You then engineer your way to electoral victory by gerrymandering and denying poor people and Blacks the vote.

It's no wonder America is so dysfunctional, nor that right-wing parties elsewhere have attempted to follow the American play-book.  After all, most billionaires are perfectly happy to pay less tax than nurses and teachers, and if you can construct a political movement which achieves that, then why not?