Dom4subssub4doms
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February 16, 2012
Moochers Against Welfare
By PAUL KRUGMAN
First, Atlas shrugged. Then he scratched his head in puzzlement.
Modern Republicans are very, very conservative; you might even (if you were Mitt Romney) say, severely conservative. Political scientists who use Congressional votes to measure such things find that the current G.O.P. majority is the most conservative since 1879, which is as far back as their estimates go.
And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs. Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.
Many readers of The Times were, therefore, surprised to learn, from an excellent article published last weekend, that the regions of America most hooked on Mr. Santorum’s narcotic — the regions in which government programs account for the largest share of personal income — are precisely the regions electing those severe conservatives. Wasn’t Red America supposed to be the land of traditional values, where people don’t eat Thai food and don’t rely on handouts?
The article made its case with maps showing the distribution of dependency, but you get the same story from a more formal comparison. Aaron Carroll of Indiana University tells us that in 2010, residents of the 10 states Gallup ranks as “most conservative” received 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers, while the number for the 10 most liberal states was only 17.1 percent.
Now, there’s no mystery about red-state reliance on government programs. These states are relatively poor, which means both that people have fewer sources of income other than safety-net programs and that more of them qualify for “means-tested” programs such as Medicaid. By the way, the same logic explains why there has been a jump in dependency since 2008. Contrary to what Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney suggest, Mr. Obama has not radically expanded the safety net. Rather, the dire state of the economy has reduced incomes and made more people eligible for benefits, especially unemployment benefits. Basically, the safety net is the same, but more people are falling into it.
But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen three main explanations.
First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t.
Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.
Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.”
Presumably, then, voters imagine that pledges to slash government spending mean cutting programs for the idle poor, not things they themselves count on. And this is a confusion politicians deliberately encourage. For example, when Mr. Romney responded to the new Obama budget, he condemned Mr. Obama for not taking on entitlement spending — and, in the very next breath, attacked him for cutting Medicare.
The truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, and working families, so any significant cuts would have to fall largely on people who believe that they don’t use any government program.
The message I take from all this is that pundits who describe America as a fundamentally conservative country are wrong. Yes, voters sent some severe conservatives to Washington. But those voters would be both shocked and angry if such politicians actually imposed their small-government agenda.
and some more uncomfortable facts.... who exactly are the sponges???? perhaps I should whine my union job paid so much I had to subsidize all those idiots who hate unions and work for 15 dollars an hr. quote:
what explains the distribution of federal taxing and spending? As you can see from the map, states that get the "worst deal"—that is, have the lowest ratio of federal spending to taxes paid—are generally high-income states either on the coasts or with robust urban areas (such as Illinois and Minnesota). Perhaps not coincidentally, these "donor" states also tend to vote for Democrat candidates in national elections. Similarly, many states that get the "best deal" are lower-income states in the mid-west and south with expansive rural areas that tend to vote Republican.
News reports commonly interpret this to mean that "red state" lawmakers are more successful at bringing home federal spending than "blue state" lawmakers. It's often suggested that the way to correct this imbalance is for "blue state" lawmakers to step up efforts to capture additional spending for their states, and for "red state" lawmakers to pare back their voracious appetite for ever-growing pork-barrel spending.
This interpretation may be appealing, but it's probably wrong. The much more likely factor driving the persistent imbalance between federal taxing and spending isn't the relative ability of lawmakers to "bring home the bacon," but is the fact that higher income states bear a larger fraction of the federal tax burden—an imbalance that is sharply amplified by the progressive structure of the federal income tax.
For whatever reason, so-called "blue states" tend to be high-income areas that pay the vast majority of federal taxes. Some 84 percent of federal individual income taxes—which account for over 40 percent of federal revenue—are paid by the those in the top 25 percent of the income distribution. The majority of these taxpayers live in wealthy, urban, politically "blue" areas like New York, California, and Massachusetts.
Even if federal spending were equal in all states, wealthy states would still send substantially more federal tax dollars to Washington than they received in spending, simply because they earn a majority of the nation's income. This disparity is greatly magnified by the progressive rate structure of the federal income tax, which taxes higher income states more heavily than low-income states, regardless of the level of spending received.
Still think the problem is not enough federal spending in "donor states"? Consider the table below. In 2004 federal discretionary spending was about $895 billion. How much would the largest "donor states" have had to receive in federal spending to boost their spending-taxing ratio to New Mexico's 2.0, the biggest "beneficiary state" that year?
As the table makes clear, far more than is realistically possible. California alone would need to receive more than half of the nation's discretionary spending. The lesson? The distribution of federal taxing and spending is mostly driven by tax burdens, not the ability of lawmakers to divert spending to their home states
84 percent of federal taxes come form liberal states....who are the ones on the dole? What are the demographics of the top 10 subsiidized states and when they vote republican do they realize the economic armagedon they are seeking? http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/1397.html
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conservative reliance on welath redistribution - 
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