Well, yeah, I'd prefer to live in a Texan metropolis over, say, Illinois. Not all Republican states are purely awful, that would be an absurd conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_states_by_poverty_rate.svg

It sure looks to me like poverty rate correlates with having Republican governments. You also have to consider the immigrant factor, immigrants stay away from red states like the plague and are generally the most impoverished group.

Yeah, people move to ND because of oil jobs. My friend that lives in Fargo moved to Fargo from California because of that, it's one of the few low-education jobs that pays decently. I think much of that has slowed down recently, but it is one of the primary reasons people move to ND. (Technically he lives in MN, but Fargo is the biggest city in ND /s).

Some Republican states are doing really badly -- especially in the south -- but some of them are doing pretty well. Idaho, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Indiana, Utah... for the most part, states in the interior without many immigrants.

None of this is really making me think that you can tell a story that there's a very strong correlation between Republican governments coming in at the state level and ransacking their state economies. But looking at some of this data does make me think that the south is exceptionally bad at governance.

Really? Oil prices are high. Drill baby, drill.

heh, if you look at how Trump's approval rating has changed over time, you see that the place where he's sustained his popularity the strongest is in the south.

The people who say that Trump's support isn't best explained by economics/economic insecurity might have a point...

Odd that Fargo would come up in two completely different contexts in this page of the thread but oh well

It seems like they're not saying that providing healthcare and pensions lowers a state's score, but that paying for them by taking on debt rather than with revenue lowers your score. That seems like an fairly reasonable way to talk about fiscal responsibility.

Either way, I'm not seeing a huge discrepancy in this study and other studies.

Right, areas that are basically industrial farming, or oil/mineral producing. The sum population of all of the "good" Republican states you mention was ~33 million in 2010. They are extremely small populations centered around a few industries. The "bad" southern Republican states was ~91 million. To put 33 million in perspective, LA county alone housed 10 million in 2010. So, yes, there are Republican regions which perform, but the reasons they perform don't suggest they're great places to live, they suggest the only reason people live there at all is because of the work opportunities.



Tech has the best jobs, tbh, and American tech survives well in the global economy. But to get a decent job in tech, it requires secondary education. Blue states fund their universities the best. There's no reason red states couldn't fund education more and try to compete. Texas does a bit, but mostly they'd rather give tax breaks to low-skill industries, which is why they're so Trumpy. In other words, they're doubling down on a losing strategy.

Or, I guess what would happen if red states funded their universities is, students would get good tech degrees then move to blue states to get decent high skill jobs. Or move to the blue places in Texas for decent high skill jobs.

There are also reasons why blue states spend more. CA has, for instance, the Lanterman act. The Lanterman act does a huge amount to help people with developmental disabilities get education, access medication and to live in decent conditions. I've heard a bit about the treatment of developmentally disabled people in red states, and some of them sound pretty awful, they're basically thrown into warehouse style facilities or prison. By the way, poverty statistics do not factor in incarcerated people - who are largely very poor, and yes, southern red states incarcerate the most people. So the official poverty statistics might be bumped up a few points on that fact alone.

But, yeah, if I was going to have a child with developmental disabilities, I'd much rather have them in CA - the treatment and dignity they experience is still suboptimal, but it's lightyears beyond what you'll see in many other states. It costs alot, but these kinds of things are more about what kind of society we prefer to live in than barebones economic factors.

I suspect that people live there because they were born there. There's a human element to this that can't be reduced to rational economic decision-making, which is that people develop profound attachments to the places that they were born and don't intend to move. So the fact that a lot of these states don't have very large populations doesn't seem relevant. They're still voting for Republican governments, and that's not really hampering the improvement of their lives.

So going back to the initial point, I still don't think you've given me a good reason to think that the story you're telling about Republican governments coming in and basically running states into the ground with austerity programs really fits much of the data we've been considering.



I mean, the reason why red states can't spend more money on education is because they're impoverished.

It's true that some of the wealthier states by GDP per capita spend the most in the country on education in absolute dollars (CT, MA, NY, etc). But check this out. I know this isn't the most relevant data because it's dated and because it covers elementary school and high school data rather than post-secondary education. But states in the deep south were spending higher percentages of their GDP on education than most other states. West Virginia, too: https://nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/primary-08.html



But that doesn't really explain why they spend more. That's just an example of them spending more. Ultimately, a big reason why blue states spend more on education is because they generate way more wealth.

To add to this, this idea of having a connection to where you're from that trumps economic considerations is something that I think a lot of Americans living in urban areas on the coasts don't understand very well. Many people in rural areas are born in a place, and want to raise their families there and die there, because that's what their parents did. But they also have a strong sense of responsibility and a strong desire to make the place where they live better, because they feel like they belong there, and their sense of self and dignity is tied up the place and the quality of life its able to sustain.

Do you think it's a coincidence that high value add businesses avoid operating in conservative places?

No. Those places don't have adequate labor forces for those sorts of businesses because they don't have the wealth to sustain and produce large educated labor forces.

Rural socal? Texas outside Austin? Rural BC/Alberta?

Russia? Saudi Arabia?

Whatcha getting at?

There are plenty of conservative places with the wealth to cultivate an educated, high-skill workforce if they desired. They don't desire.

Conservatism is anti-change. That means it's also anti-growth, because growth is a sort of change. Conservative governments stack rules in favor of incumbents and consider it a reasonable, sustainable thing to do. The consequence is that they let their service industry die on the vine to keep the mill open for another few years.

This isn't, like, intentional or anything. They aren't literally raiding startups and driving them out of town. But it's stuff like tax breaks for the mill, or letting the mill pollute as much as they want, or spending extra on infrastructure for the mill, or school programs to encourage kids to work at the mill instead of a well-rounded education. All of this amounts to high value businesses being asked to pay to keep some local vanity project alive. High value add businesses know to stay far away from that sort of thing.

Anybody who's lived in a conservative area knows what the mill means. It's not always literally a mill. Although it does mill away a ****load of the locals' money.

Okay, I don't see why you wouldn't buy the narrative, other than a reflexive defensiveness of red states. I think any time spent reading into the causes will reveal there's lots of plausible reasons to believe Republican state governments increase poverty. If you want a causal explanation, here's why I think having a Republican government increases poverty, told through events in Wisconsin:

Republican legislatures attacking unions immediately preceded lowering teacher wages
Foxxconn is receiving ~$4 billion in subsidies
Poverty is increasing still in Wisconsin, and is at a 30 year high.
Despite this, Wisconsin is working to cut benefits

There are also case studies to do. Wisconsin can be compared to Minnesota, both are geographically, politically and economically pretty similar, except Minnesota is further left than Wisconsin. Minnesota performed better economically, including higher wage growth, lower unemployment, and higher jobs growth. A huge reason for Minnesota performing better is that Twin Cities (which houses U MN Twin Cities, a great school) has become an area of tech job growth. If you check out CompTIA's data, it's numerically clear that MN has been performing better in tech than WI.



It's a double edged sword - they can't compete because they're impoverished, they're impoverished because they can't compete. The important thing is, Republican policies do not remedy that they can't compete and do not remedy impoverishment. Instead of recognizing the futility of trying to keep e.g. coal alive, they give coal massive incentives, which does little to help the economy but enriches friends, and then they pass legislation which is crafted to hurt blue states. That's in particular why I'm annoyed that you blame Democrats constantly for every little thing: maybe red states are just stuck in a backwards age, and are trying to rip off blue states to keep themselves going. Maybe their own lack of innovation is a problem. Maybe if they were, you know, more liberal, and could adapt themselves, Trumpism wouldn't be a thing.

I know I'm being pushy but seriously, I don't like this constant barrage of blame against liberals/Democrats for issues that have been brewing for a long time. If China can outcompete American manufacturing, like yeah, it sucks, and changing your way of life sucks, but you don't win by cutting all funding from stuff to subsidize ****ty industries, lowering standard of living so workers are coerced to work and have no other options, to become competitive with miserable workers in China. You win by adapting in the best way; that's what blue states are doing and why you see blue states swallowing up more of the GDP and red states becoming losers.

As a side note, I wonder if you removed tech job growth from red states, how much of a difference that would make in income and other relevant statistics. Like, just how much are other industries losing?

I really like this comparison on WI vs. MN performance:

No, it's not that at all. It's that given that data we were considering, I didn't think we'd together talked about information that would tip the scales and make me think that having a Republican state legislature correlates strongly with poor state management through austerity, and that that makes the party that governs a state a more important factor in its economic success/weakness than globalization. That doesn't mean that there's no argument that would satisfy me.

I mean, look, going back to education, it's true that states with Republican legislatures have been cutting spending on education, but that's because virtually all states cut spending on education because of the 2008 recession:





It's not zero-sum. Just because I'm saying that Republican state legislatures don't universally **** up states doesn't mean that I'm saying that Democrats would, or that they'd be worse. We haven't been talking about Democrats at all in this discussion, so I don't think you have a good reason to say that I "blame" Democrats for "every little thing."

I've never voted for someone who wasn't a Democrat.



But not everyone can compete because they live in impoverished states that aren't capable of improving their lot. That's why at the beginning I was pointing out -- globalization has winners, it has losers, let's help the losers more with a geographic redistribution of wealth.

Or, if not, let's disentangle states from each other more, or devolve more power to the states, or something, so that we lower the stakes for states of what happens at the federal level. Federalism. That goes back to something I was saying earlier, which is that we've had a lot of consolidation of power in the federal government, as well as a consolidation of our national media discussion to a few coastal cities, and the consolidation of a lot of wealth into a very small number of massive cities. It needs to matter less to people what happens in DC, NY, LA and SF.

I'll read through the other stuff you wrote and respond later, since that'll take a bit more work.

Going to check some of the other links you posted but, just to make sure the goal posts aren't moving, the point at which we disagree isn't over whether Republican state legislatures have better outcomes than Democratic ones. It's whether states that are struggling are struggling because of mismanagement (especially Republican mismanagement) or whether other factors are more important.

One pretty consistent theme in all of the browsing I've done tonight is that Arizona is ****ed. lol

A global trend being the most significant trend doesn't mean other trends don't exist in the data. This is precisely what I mean with the thing about globalization, yes globalization is a big force, but that doesn't mean there's negligible difference between Democrat & Republican state legislatures on how the state performs. There's also a bunch to consider with state budgets on education, like, where did the funding start from? If blue states already spent a bunch more before the recession, they can cut a similar percentage and still be spending more. I'm pretty sure Republicans have spent less. In fact, there's data on this:

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html

When I sort by spending per student, the top of the list has some red, and many blue northeast state, but bottoming the chart are basically a who's who of red middle America. In other words, not all of these trends started after 2008.



Sorry, I meant the comments about Democrats haven't done enough to appeal to red state voters over globalization. Maybe they haven't appealed right, but I think objectively, while they aren't perfect, Democrats win in the era of globalizatio. My conclusion about Democrats and globalization is just the opposite, if these states went more democratic they'd do better. I think it's mostly the sheer force of Republican messaging that has prevented people from voting for the "survive under globalization" party.



Of course they can. There's no reason red states can't adapt more than they do. In fact, it's not even that they're incapable of change - they actively resist it! Their goals are clearly stated to be a defense of old, outdated industries and cronyism.

Again, globalization has strong effects, but to think that means there's zero difference or comparison between Republican and Democrat state governments is pretty out there.



Okay.

If I had to rank which is the most important, I'd say globalization is a bigger factor in each state's economy than the current legislature, definitely. So I wasn't trying to argue that globalization isn't effecting state economies in a big way, what I'm saying is that the way Democrats react vs. the way Republicans react has a real hand in how these states fair during globalization. Like, you pointed to the chart which shows the blue state's share of the GDP has increased - I'm saying that's no accident at all, that Democrat policies are responsible, and Republican policies are inferior in the face of this global event.

It would be interesting to track how much a state's economy has adapted (as a proportion of each industry) versus growth, do states which try harder to preserve their industries tend to suffer more? That'd be my hypothesis, but it'd be worth checking out.

I mean, I'm sure you know this, but globalization has been a bipartisan project. It's something that Democrats and Republicans constructed together from Reagan through Obama. (You could argue that it goes back further, to the end of WWII, or even earlier, but I digress.) Neither party has done a very good job with mitigating the destructive aspects of globalization, although Democrats pay it more lip-service I guess. Trump seemed to care more about it than Hillary in 2016, and that was undoubtedly a significant part of his appeal.

But yeah, I did say that at the very beginning of this conversation. I think Democrats really shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to messaging and by intentionally contracting their own coalition. A large part of it is attacking whites, especially white males. You remember all of the nonsense with Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright accusing women who supported Bernie of being traitors to their sex and only doing it because all of the boys were Bernie fans. Why divide your coalition like that?

It's maddenly stupid to drive people away who support your policies, by making their identities more salient to them than your policies, and then to berating them for their identities. But it seems that Democrats want to create a strong sense of an in-group and an out-group in order to maintain their coalition. And it's ironic that they'd be the party of income inequality, yet you also find resistance to people who think Democrats should try to appeal to traditional Republican voters, when in many cases they live in poorer parts of the country and have suffered from income inequality.

Anyway this is exceptionally ranty but I complain about Democrats because I think they're leftward drift and the cultural battle they're choosing to fight is more noxious than many realize, and because it's my party but I feel like I don't have a place in it anymore.

I'm more inclined to think the growing geographic inequality from 2000 to 2016 had more to do with the recession under Bush and then the uneven economic recovery under Obama than with Republican policies in state legislatures. Wealthy people generally live in coastal areas. With the recovery that Obama oversaw, the richer you were, the more rapidly you were able to grow your wealth. Plus, smaller businesses weren't able to weather the recession, which meant independent businesses in more remote areas went out of business -- and so a destruction of wealth in those places.

It's again, not really a matter of big global effects. Ceteris paribus, having a Republican legislature is going to hold your state back economically over a Democrat one. I think the evidence supports this, and I think the effect is not negligible.

It's certainly true, though, that the Republicans of a past era were more like Democrats. That era left a while ago, I think.

lmao careful it sounds like you are making the point that they are a better option for addressing climate change (I have heard this from a conservative before)

We're spinning in circles, but I don't know how true that is. Going back to that chart about education spending, states had to cut their spending no matter what party their legislature belonged to. I don't know if all things being equal here means much here, because you can't abstract away the magnitude of the recession and what it required of state governments. So: legislatures cut spending like crazy because they had no other choice. These policies weren't implemented in an historical vacuum; they can't be abstracted from their context, from the concrete circumstances they were responding to.

But whatever I'm the one who's pushing at this point, so I think the onus is on me to bring something new to the table.

Maybe if the industries they were protecting weren't coal and steel manufacturing, lol.



Yeah, like I recognize Republican cut proportionally as much as Democrats, it's that Republican states never spent as much to begin with, lol. Not that schools should be that expensive anyway, those costs are ridiculous, but dang.

Yup, "the mill" = coal mine for Trump, or any other sort of uncompetitive money drain.

And yeah, we feel for these people. Their lives are being disrupted, and change of this sort does suck. That's the compassion people do feel for Trump supporters from various industrial states, and I think it's genuine, but then they're like "well if only the ******s wouldn't kneel then we'd be great" and it's like oookay then buddy.

https://mobile.twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1021234525626609666?s=21

Uhhhh

a very stable genius

We're still going in circles, but, this comment doesn't really reflect a lot of the things that we've discovered in the course of his conversation. The story of Republican states is a little more nuanced than that. It's simply not true that they "never" spend as much on education. Look at North Dakota: a Republican state that's investing massively in education as it enjoys rapid growth. Alaska, too. Or look at some of those states in the deep south that I mentioned before, that, while they have significantly less money, have spent a much greater share of their GDP on education than other so-called liberal states.

It might be that what it means to be a Republican in NH is very different from what it means to be a Republican in AZ or CA or AL. Or maybe the differing economic situations of different states is more of a decisive factor than what party runs state legislatures. But whatever the reason is, the story that Republican state legislatures gut their states with low taxes and spending cuts that harm their economies doesn't really square with the outcomes.

Is North Dakota spending more on education because they value the economic contributions of an educated workforce, or are they spending more on education because their resource economy has cost diseased education up?

look at all that juice

So basically as far as I can tell, ND is just barely keeping up with their local labor market for teacher pay. I didn't include it in the first graph, but in the reporting period ND has expanded their total number of teachers by 1.4% per year. That's basically equal to ND's per year population growth since the 2010 census.

Soooooo, uh,... yeah, lol. It doesn't look like they're actually doing much of anything past keeping the lights on.