Soooo… republican people and their policies are fiscally conservative? Are they defining " fiscally conservative" as: We don’t really like money? Or just don’t have any idea how to make it?
That’s just because we’re giving so much to those liberal welfare queens in the liberal states, Amirite? Amirite? Yeah, it’s about time the red states got some real help from the federal government, not like those handouts that all the blue states get. Then the income gap would shrink, and the red states would be even more productive, because there is absolutely no industry or capital investment in those socialist blue states.
Here’s a page with sortable columns showing statistics similar to OP’s. Click on Health to see also that the states with poorest health voted for Romney. (I think I got the link from an SDMB thread.)
It might be nice to get detailed data and do some number-crunching. Is it as simple as urban vs rural? Do rural areas have poorer average income and health than urban areas? :dubious:
It’s a complicated phenomenon; poorer states are more likely to vote Republican, but poorer people within each state are more likely to vote for Democrats. Red states are red because middle-class-to-rich people in those states vote in massive, overwhelming numbers for Republicans, whereas in blue states, voting behavior is much less tightly correlated with income (although people’s chance of voting Republican still goes up slightly as they get richer). This paper has more discussion of this phenomenon.
Regardless communities with high numbers of democrats foster higher incomes overall where communities with high numbers of republicans do the opposite.
I didn’t read the whole article, but it sounds to me that this is just the obvious result of the Southern strategy. The poorer states tend to be in the south than in the north. Within the northern states Racial issues play a lesser role in politics, while within the southern states the (more wealthy) whites tend to vote Republican while the (more poor) minorities tend to vote Democrat.
If you wanted to see if Republicans knew how to make money, wouldn’t it be better to look at the average income of the folks who voted for Romney vs Obama? I don’t see what you’d expect to learn by looking at the “by state” numbers…
Here you go. Looks like the know how to make money to me!
Not really. Economics are an ecosystem. I’m interested in what communities produce wealth vs which are merely parasitic. We set policy to make the country strong as a whole, not to create aristocracy plays.
I don’t think we can assume that. Plus it may be that these voters didn’t care so much about fiscal conservatism as much social conservatism. Obama is, after all, a socialist muslim despot Kenyan trying to turn U.S Sovereignty over to the United Nations while taking our guns and killing babies.
Or so I’ve heard.
Anytime I see these numbers I just sort of laugh. You let someone loose on a set of statistics and it’s very easy for them to make asinine points.
What’s the point with this? I thought everyone learned the difference between correlation and causation in school, and this correlation is weak at best, too. Note that even the thread title is evocative of the simplicity inherent in just posting these statistics without any further effort or argument. “14/15 of the Lowest Per Capita States are Republican.”
Okay, so we define a State as “Republican” if more people vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 than for Barack Obama? That seems a strange metric for me. Most of these States have at least 40% Obama supporters, so is it your argument that if a population splits 60/40 Republican / Democrat in a Presidential election that State is ran badly and thus condemned to poverty? What do you think a list of the 15 lowest per capita States in 1960 would look like, and which candidate do you believe they would have voted for in the Presidential election?
Some of those States I can tell you without any further research (West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and South Carolina) have been among the very poorest of the States since the 1860s so I seriously doubt we can make any argument that anything about the modern Republican party is really at the root of their poverty. Those States have always suffered relative poverty, and many of them have been very Democratic in the Past. People often scoff at that and say “well that’s back when the Democrats just hated blacks!!”, sure, in some cases that is the truth. But back in the 30s and 40s most of those States were heavily Democrat and that also meant heavily pro-union and pro-organized labor. One of the big cornerstones of prosperity according to modern day Democrats. The reality is those States are almost certainly poor for reasons wholly unrelated to their politics.
West Virginia in fact it’s silly to even call Republican, they’ve voted Republican in every Presidential since 2000, but they’ve also had a Democrat Governor that entire time and the last time the West Virginia House was majority Republican was in 1928, and the West Virginia Senate has been Democrat since the 30s. If you’re really making a compelling argument about Republican leadership somehow leading to poverty you’ve not really done it here. All you’ve shown here is that in the year 2012 poor States tended to vote for Mitt Romney. But that doesn’t even demonstrate these States are ran by Republicans, some of them aside from West Virginia are probably also ran by Democrats. Nor does it explain how voting say, 55% for Romney somehow explains a State’s poor economy.
OK, but that’s a completely different issue than you wrote in your OP. So, are we changing the goal posts? Are you ready to say that you were wrong when you wrote that Republicans “don’t have any idea how to make it”? “It” being money.
I want to make sure we are clear on what the parameters are before proceeding further.
You got one of those cite thingies to support that claim?
Not sure where I set goalposts the way you describe but whatever.
Who is most responsible in a company for how much that company succeeds or fails? Is it the management and educated staff or the uneducated lower wage workers? I’m going to assume that these mostly southern republicans are the former group. Then I’m going to assume they have more influence on business strategy and state-wide economic culture. Then I’m going to assume that if the avg of income remains record-breaking low under these shrugging Atlases that that is that part of the population’s fault.
If its not the upper compensated members of the staff I’m just going to assume you would like CEO’s and other high level personnel to start giving their bonuses back to the rest of the employees.
I’m sure mid to high earners would like to be only measured by their take home package, unfortunately for most people the rest of their impact on the community is actually more important than what they can grift on contract day.
How could you not be sure? You stated it explicitly in your OP:
In what way does your stat show that Republicans don’t a) like money or b) know how to make it?
Voters are voters. No voter is a manager or a worker. You analogy is nonsense, and your assumption is unfounded. And if you want to discuss Ayn Rand, I suggest you start a thread about her, rather than throwing out random phrases as if that constitutes a reasoned argument.
Now, was your OP a mistake or not? Because if you’re not willing to admit that you either made a mistake or, at best, chose misleading wording, then I suspect all you’re doing is throwing shit up against the wall and seeing what sticks. And as soon as someone shoots down your incorrect assertion, you just shift to something else.
So what is your counter-premise? That the political view people have on economics has nothing to do with whether they can add value by running a business? That’s pretty counter to the whole republican fairy tale about being job creators ect. Either they are responsible or they aren’t. Their house of illogic doesn’t stand if political viewpoints and culture are not responsible for economic outcomes. We have a common factor in a hugely trended set of data. 14/15 top and bottom. That’s massive correlation. As others have said it’s the middle to top earers in those states voting overwhelmingly republican more than the lower end. Either republicans have to stop saying the wealthy create jobs or admit that their political culture correlates with poverty. With not knowing how to make money. It’s one or the other.
(Clearly republicans like money, but if the choice is between people who get money while lifting all boats and making more net money or people who just get money and hole up in a mansion well… easy choice.)
This is your thread, your conclusion (not premise). Your conclusion doesn’t hold water. It’s not up to me to propose any alternative. I might later on, but I still want to understand what position you are staking out first.
OK, now we seem to be back to your original assertion. Just to be clear, are you saying that if more Democrats are heads of successful businesses, this is a validation of the Democratic party platform, at least in the economic sphere? And vice versa if Republicans are more successful CEOs?
We can get to the whole bit about correlation and causation later, but first I want you to settle onto a position statement that you wish to debate. Is it that the party affiliation of successful businesspeople is a validation of that party’s economic principles?