In the Sunday New York Times, writer Steven Johnson makes the case that the Blue States are the new Tea Party.
The argument goes like this: People who live in major coastal cities tend to pay more in federal taxes than their states get back in federal spending. They also tend to have unequal representation in Congress (and by extension, in the Electoral College) because of each state gets two senators, regardless of population. In short, they’re getting a raw deal.
[T]he prevailing sense that the big cities are dependent on government bailouts and benefits, while the less dense regions live responsibly. … bears no resemblance to the current economic map of the United States, where the major cities are now overwhelmingly the engines of economic growth and wealth creation — and also tax revenue.
For complicated reasons — some of which have to do with rural poverty, some of which have to do with the basic physics of supporting infrastructure in low-density regions — a disproportionate amount of per capita federal spending and benefits now flow down to the low-density states. … Put those two trends together and you have a grievance worthy of the original Tea Party: more taxation with less representation. The urban states are subsidizing the rural states, and yet somehow in return, the rural states get more power at the voting booth.
To my ears, this argument smacks of the old justifications for limiting suffrage to landowners. “You people already whined so much about bailing out my bank — what are you trying to pull now with this ‘Electoral College’ business?”
But it has some underlying truth. The Senate — and thus by extension the Electoral College — was designed to be unfair to large states, and in such a way that even a Constitutional amendment wouldn’t be enough to change it. But it was also agreed to by the large-population states (most of which were also centers of commerce in their time, by the way) because they wanted the Union in the first place and couldn’t have gotten it otherwise.
As for the business about unevenly distributed federal spending, Johnson is correct, so long as you look at raw federal spending data and each state’s contribution to federal revenue as if all government spending were equal.
But of course, it isn’t so. For obvious reasons, they chose a remote site in New Mexico to design and build the atomic bomb — not Manhattan. To this day, the presence of the Los Alamos National Laboratory helps bring an oversized take of federal spending to a small rural state every year. It’s not a reason for New Yorkers to feel oppressed.
Remember that defunct (or at least stalled) attempt to build a nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada? As of 2013, $38 billion in federal money had been thrown at it, substantially more than that state’s annual budget. Even so, you might recall that Nevadans did not feel privileged about this “subsidy.”
Or even consider the other western states where the federal government owns a large majority of the land and spends a lot of taxpayer money making sure most of it won’t be put to any good use — and some would argue, even managing it in such a way that makes large wildfires more likely. Speaking of which, I know a lot of Idahoans would absolutely love to give back the $6.7 million (1992 dollars) that the feds spent to reintroduce wolves into their forests — or better yet, spend the same amount to humanely recapture the animals and give them a new home in Central Park.
Another thought: Sometimes it’s a lot cheaper to build in the hinterlands. And people there tend to be a little less NIMBY because there’s more room to breathe. Would you like to have a federal prison in your neighborhood, or would you like it to be in a remote part of West Virginia?
None of this proves that the system isn’t unfair, but I hope it at least sows some doubt about the wisdom of assuming all federal spending is the same.
Now, “rural poverty” (as mentioned as one cause of this disparity in the Times piece) is very real, and as Johnson argues, it does contribute to some rural states’ disproportionate consumption of federal money through safety net programs.
Then again, a lot of rural states are shortchanged in this respect, whereas New York and California both take more than the national average. Here’s a look at how much federal Medicaid money (the biggest safety-net program by a long way) goes to each state for every dollar its residents pay in taxes:
Now, no one should mistake what I’m saying as some kind of argument that Nebraska deserves a third senator. My only point is that perhaps we should just admit that the reality is more nuanced. There is no easy stereotype for identifying which kind of state is more prone to federal government dependency.
Perhaps us city slickers would do better to train our fire on bad rural subsidies where they pop up (the ethanol mandate, for starters), rather than recreate Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment out of frustration with the election results.
