In the process, I came across an article from 2002 on the Ohio State University web site, which noted the following.

"In a curious paradox of the Electoral College, Bush won most of the states that benefit from federal spending, while Gore won most of the states that bankroll the federal government. Perhaps more interesting, the states in which Al Gore did worse than Bill Clinton did in 1996 are the states that increased their net take from the federal government in the two years leading up to the 2000 election. These curious empirical patterns hold under several different perspectives on the data, and they raise an interesting puzzle about Electoral College votes and federal spending."

So, getting more federal money apparently makes people vote Republican. Thus, the answer to retaking the White House may be for Congressional Republicans to spend MORE money in states like California to improve the paid/return ratio. Apparently people vote Republican when they think things are getting better.

I did not claim that military and highway spending was concentrated in red states. My claim was that this sort of spending cannot be classified as "welfare" in the traditional sense of the word regardless of whether it is spent in a rural (red) or urban (blue) areas. I used those as examples only.

Let me clarify. To use one example, interstate 80, which east to west passes through 11 states – New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Now, of those 11 states, the three least populous also happen to have the longest stretches of highway – Nebraska – 455mi., Nevada 410mi, and Wyoming 401mi. That’s 1266 miles total for those three states which calculates to nearly half (43%) of the entire 2900 mile route. The thing is, if you want interstate 80 to go from coast to coast, you have no choice but to route it through some very sparsely populated states – areas which also happen to be red states. This is going to skew that total statistic, don’t you think?

If you want a more meaningful statistic, then break out all of the spending that truly is "welfare" and lets see what the comparison by state is then.

The poverty rate in California is 13% and it’s 11% in North Dakota. North Dakota may have received more than 100% of the federal tax dollars its citizens paid out, but that certainly can’t be because per capita poverty is so much worse than it is in California.

I don’t think that states (and cities) are prosperous because they turned blue. I think they turned blue because, at one time, they were prosperous and drew a lot of people in. And I think turning blue tends to be a one-way flip.

but I actually agree with you – whereas 99% of the people looking at the data are doing so from a perspective of a zero sum game. I argue that its not really welfare, its actually a rising tide. Seee my comments above in response to zach.

Also, overall amount of federal dollars received does not tell you that an economy is lagging. Yes, 12% of North Dakotan’s are living below poverty level, but so are 13% of Californians, 11% of the folks in Illinois and 14% of the folks in New York.

As you created this thread to respond to two of my own threads (Dean simply repeated one of mine), I think I’m the one that knows where the debate is really at.

I started it after all.