Red vs. Blue Update

Nathan Newman reports that The Tax Foundation has issued its latest report on who pays and who gets paid. The results: the Red States are subsidized by the Blue States. In Newman’s words,

“And large industrial “blue states” inevitably receive less. California receives only $5592 per capita for its citizens, New Jersey only $5509, Illinois only $5373. New York is doing better on getting aid than a few years ago, but still ranks only 26 on list of per capita receivers of aid.

So the next time you hear about a “welfare state”, think Bush-voting state.

Meanwhile, Atrios links to this NYT analysis of changes in housing prices from 1983 to 2003. In a nutshell, if you believe that people vote with their pocket books, then they are overwhelmingly voting for the Blue regions.

For previous Red vs. Blue posts, see the Topics section at the top left.

AB

P.S. Here’s a project for someone with lots of time on their hands: Take this map of red and blue counties in 2000. It’s one that Fox News and various conservatives love to cite because it is in fact overwhelmingly red, although most of the red areas are sparsely populated (if democracy were “one square mile, one vote” instead of “one person one vote” then Republicans would rule the country, but it’s not). Back to the project: Now find county-by-county data on changes in housing prices over the last 10 or 20 years. Sort them in decending order of changes in housing values. Identify the top 677 and the bottom 2,434 (the respective number of counties carried by Gore and Bush). Now use mapping software to color-code the map in Red (top 677 counties) and Blue (bottom 2,434 counties). Finally put the maps side by side–can you tell them apart?