Thread: Welfare-queen states

Harold Meyerson Opinion Writer

Welfare-queen states

By Harold Meyerson, Published: May 17

Okay. Just for the hell of it, let’s go after the debt and the deficit the Republican way. No new taxes. All through cutbacks. And I’ll confine my quibbles to a few parenthetical asides.

To begin, then: We’re broke! We can’t afford any more taxes! (Well, America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers certainly can. In 1955, according to the Campaign for America’s Future, the country’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers had an average income of $13.3 million (in 2008 dollars) and paid 51.2 percent of that in federal income taxes. In 2008, according to IRS calculations, they had an average income of $270.5 million and paid 18 percent of that in federal income taxes. And in 1955, by the way, we could afford to pave roads.)

Harold Meyerson
Writes a weekly political and domestic affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

Republicans’ concern over the growth of government is moral as well as fiscal. To quote the House Republican “road mapâ€

Wow! The author is really on to something here. Now if he would only be intellectually honest enough to tell us specifically what the money flows into those so called Red States for and who actually recieves it.

Please tell us who gets the money and how they voted. As we all know there are some solid Democrat voting blocks in states such as Alabama and West Virginia. Tell us if it were those who voted Democrat that got that debt money from Uncle Sam or if it were those voting Republican.

It would be nice to know where the Federal Government put its money to work in the states called into question. Was it done to satisfy their own mandates of one kind or another? Perhaps a little muscle behind its social engineering effforts? Did the states and all their RED voters really have their hat in hand begging for all that money coming from Illinois and California?

And surely the author is not attempting to excuse the pathetic economic and budget conditions in a number of so called net contributors by suggesting they are being forced by the Federal Government to give away too much of their money. Now that would be rich!

I strongly suspect that discussing the actual details would lead rather quickly to what those in the State Serving Media would refer to as a somewhat politically incorrect conversation. And then the micro based facts would no longer make the the political point the author is rather haphazzardly attempting to make based on a macro statistic.

But since he brought it up how about it....

Originally Posted by SovereignMan

Wow! The author is really on to something here. Now if he would only be intellectually honest enough to tell us specifically what the money flows into those so called Red States for and who actually recieves it.

Please tell us who gets the money and how they voted. As we all know there are some solid Democrat voting blocks in states such as Alabama and West Virginia. Tell us if it were those who voted Democrat that got that debt money from Uncle Sam or if it were those voting Republican.

It would be nice to know where the Federal Government put its money to work in the states called into question. Was it done to satisfy their own mandates of one kind or another? Perhaps a little muscle behind its social engineering effforts? Did the states and all their RED voters really have their hat in hand begging for all that money coming from Illinois and California?

And surely the author is not attempting to excuse the pathetic economic and budget conditions in a number of so called net contributors by suggesting they are being forced by the Federal Government to give away too much of their money. Now that would be rich!

I strongly suspect that discussing the actual details would lead rather quickly to what those in the State Serving Media would refer to as a somewhat politically incorrect conversation. And then the micro based facts would no longer make the the political point the author is rather haphazzardly attempting to make based on a macro statistic.

But since he brought it up how about it....

Here is his e-mail address: meyersonh@washpost.com