The only chest thumping of that nature has come from the "blue" states all these years. "Keep your hands off my pile!", "Quit leeching off of us!", "Backwoods hillbillies would be lost without us!"... when in actuality, that very argument goes against just about every other tax argument the left wants to make.
As I pointed out... the left wants nothing more than to increase taxes on the rich. To do so would disproportionately affect the tax dollars paid-in by "blue" states, since more corporations and higher concentrations of affluent personnel reside in those areas. The end result would be an even greater skew in the amount of taxes paid-in versus the return, all else being equal.
It's redistribution of wealth in action, yet the left like to trumpet it out as the rest of the country being dependent on a handful of "blue" states.
The only way to really solve the problem would be to either tax the rich less, and the poor more... or send more tax dollars to the rich states, and fewer to the poor states.
One side or the other... what's it gonna be?
Nice frame- but it really doesn't fit with what I've offered in the past. I don't have a problem with the redistribution of funds that's occurring. I support even more of it. What I do have a problem with is the perception and attitude of many parties on the receiving end.
I have a problem with the fact that they're so easily manipulated into supporting policies that run against their own interests. Cutbacks in federal funding will hurt them more because they live closer to the edge, thanks to the deep divide between rich and poor in those areas. If cutting taxes at the top was supposed to create jobs, you'd never know it in most of those places- their rich only got richer, got a firmer grip on the regional economy, used that to suppress wages and even development.
I'm sure that an argument could be made that such transfers have actually been counter productive in terms of desired outcome, that mollifying and placating lower class people in those locales is possible only because of such transfers. Left to the tender ministrations of their own wealthy, they'd be a lot colder and a lot hungrier, maybe enough so that they'd awaken from the backwardness of their cultural slumber.
