[RJL]

So did Mississippi voters support the Republicans, even though they get very little direct benefit from Bush-style tax cuts, because they — unlike New Jersey's voters — understand the magic of supply-side economics?

So in Krugman's little mind, it's always greed; what is the government going to give me, that drives all voting. How progressive, how liberal, how Democrat of him.

One would think that a supposedly trained economist would understand that the government creates no wealth.

If the government gives you $1.00 it first had to confiscate at least $1.50 (overhead in Wash DC is not cheap) from someone else, and we are all better off if we send as little as possible to Washington thereby avoiding the high overhead in DC.

[CFC__VRWC]

Actually, Rush Limbaugh quoted a statistic in one of his books (See, I Told You So, IIRC) that put the government's overhead at 72 cents per every dollar spent being "compassionate." So that owuld work out to $3.57 collected by Washington for every dollar spent "helping the ______ (insert favorite group being starved by Republicans here)".

Rush's books are pretty old (going back to the early days of Toon misrule), but I can't imagine things having improved very much since.