{"id":499874,"date":"2010-04-01T10:42:57","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T14:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.economist.com,21005786"},"modified":"2010-04-01T10:42:57","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T14:42:57","slug":"red-pork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/499874","title":{"rendered":"Red pork"},"content":{"rendered":"

A RELATIVELY poorly understood phenomenon in America is that rich, dense states tend to contribute much more in federal taxes than they get back in federal spending and tend to vote Democratic, while poor, rural states lean heavily Republican and are net recipients of federal largesse. This leads to situations where states that absorb huge amount of government aid (particularly for agriculture) are hotbeds of Tea Party activity, where voters decry the heavy boot of the federal government on their backs.<\/p>\n

Via Mark Thoma<\/a>, Jeffrey Frankel provides<\/a> an illustrative chart:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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It’s tempting to make this a huge gotcha point and slam Tea Partiers for cognitive dissonance, but the holding of conflicting beliefs is one of America’s deepest and most common traditions. Consider the results<\/a> of a recent survey:<\/p>\n

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In this economy, voters are wary of raising taxes, even if the revenue raised goes to something they deem important, like paying down the deficit. A majority (51 percent) say that even though the deficit is a big problem, we should not raise taxes to bring it down, while only 43 percent say that we might have to raise taxes to reduce the deficit. This rejection is even more acute among the least educated and lowest income voters, who are being disproportionately hurt by the recession and as such are even more strident in their rejection of a new tax to pay down the deficit.<\/p>\n

And by an even wider 2:1 margin, voters reject cuts in Social Security, Medicare or defense spending to bring the deficit down (61 to 30 percent). With nearly three-quarters of the federal budget devoted to these items, exempting them from cuts leaves little room to make realistic progress on deficit reduction…<\/p>\n

Nearly half of voters think the deficit can be reduced without real cost to entitlements, with 48 percent believing there is enough waste and inefficiency in government spending for the deficit to be reduced through spending cuts while keeping health care, Social Security, unemployment benefits and other services from being hurt.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Voters think that addressing the deficit is important, but they vehemently oppose cuts to programmes constituting the overwhelming majority of the federal budget, and they aren’t too anxious to raise taxes either. This kind of thing obviously complicates the politics of deficit reduction. Or, you know, the politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A RELATIVELY poorly understood phenomenon in America is that rich, dense states tend to contribute much more in federal taxes than they get back in federal spending and tend to vote Democratic, while poor, rural states lean heavily Republican and are net recipients of federal largesse. This leads to situations where states that absorb huge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}