Posted on 08/16/2002 8:05:55 PM PDT by owen_osh
THE Financial Times is not normally given to puffing George Bush. But on Monday it splashed a picture on its front page that, from the White House's point of view, more than made up for all those sniffy editorials about the budget deficit. A rugged-looking president is dressed in jeans and a sweat-sodden T-shirt. In his gloved hands he carries branches that he has just lopped off trees. On his head, protecting him from the searing Texas sun, he wears a white cowboy hat.
Bill Clinton spent his vacations in Martha's Vineyard, sucking up the salt air and bantering with the likes of Ted Danson. Mr Bush prefers to labour on his Texas ranch, clearing brush, chopping down trees and defying the 110-degree heat. This is a man with deep roots and solid values, the White House whispers, a man who is at home in the heartland.
Mr Bush is not the first president to repair to the heartland for reinvigoration. Teddy Roosevelt liked nothing better than trekking out west, where he slipped into cowboy regalia and slaughtered wildlife. Lyndon Johnson spent his holidays on a ranch not too far (in Texas terms) from Mr Bush's place. Jimmy Carter liked to unwind on his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia (where he once did battle with a “killer rabbit”). Even Mr Clinton was once forced to leave the beach: in 1995, with an election looming, his pollster, Dick Morris, told him that people wanted to see him hiking in the country rather than frolicking with celebrities.
Why is it deemed so important to holiday in the heartland? The centre of America certainly contains many wonderful vacation spots, but Plains, Georgia, and Crawford, Texas, are not among them. The simple reason is that Americans regard the heartland as more than just a geographical expression (the country's central and rural areas). It is a moral condition: an embodiment of the authentic American tradition of self-reliance, family values and community spirit. The inhabitants of the heartland are descendants of the rugged pioneers who carved a great civilisation out of mountains and prairies. They continue to make their living by doing proper work—by wrestling with nature rather than shuffling symbols on a screen. Mr Bush is well aware of his electoral success across “real” America, while Al Gore was left with the celluloid bits. Hence the value of that gritty picture in the FT (even if it was largely seen by stockbrokers lounging around Long Island).
But is the heartland really such an embodiment of self-reliance? Sadly, its true characteristics are not vigour and independence but economic decline and government handouts. The small communities that are supposed to embody the American spirit are, in fact, haemorrhaging jobs, people and wealth.
The worst poverty in America is probably not in the inner cities but in the countryside—in places like Mississippi, Arkansas and Kentucky. Six of the country's ten poorest counties can be found in the area stretching from Texas (where Mr Bush is so hard at work) to California's central valley. Rural people make barely 70% of the salaries of their urban counterparts. One in six rural children is being raised in poverty.
Ever since the dustbowl of the 1930s, the heartland has been hopelessly dependent on government handouts. Last year the country spent $25 billion on direct subsidies to farmers, and billions more subsidising water, power and infrastructure. Twenty-five cents of every dollar in farm revenue comes from the government. Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton, calculates that the “blue” states (ie, the phoney coastal ones that Democrats win) subsidise the red Republican states to the tune of $90 billion a year—and that was before the recent farm bill.
The secret of the heartland's success in securing such largesse is simple: political clout. Wyoming, with a population of half a million, has as many senators as California, with a population of 34m. Just 16% of the population elects half the Senate.
Yet subsidies are, at best, a mixed blessing. They are robbing the heartland of its spirit of initiative and entrepreneurship. Rural ghettos now suffer from all the dependence-induced pathologies of their urban cousins. They are also creating a sort of state-funded feudalism that is the very antithesis of the American tradition of rugged individualism. Huge quantities of government money flow to a handful of landowners, most of them in Texas and California, who preside over vast armies of ill-educated and poorly paid migrant workers.
If you want morality, go to the Hamptons
What about the heartland's much-vaunted moral qualities? Here again the image of small-town piety bears little relation to reality in rural America. The states that Mr Bush won in 2000 boast slightly higher rates for murder, illegitimacy and teenage childbirth than the supposedly degenerate states that voted for Mr Gore.
In recent years the worst increases in both crime and drug abuse have taken place in the heartland. In the past five years, bank robberies jumped by 82% in small towns, compared with 17% in America as a whole. Many rural communities are plagued by drugs, particularly amphetamines and OxyContin (an opiate pain-killer). In the 1990s the percentage of drug-related homicides tripled in rural areas but halved in big cities.
The true story of the American heartland is more complicated—and more tragic—than the one that the White House is trying to tell. The taming of the heartland is one of the great achievements of the human spirit (albeit one marred by the brutal treatment of the native population); it also includes plenty of straight-talking, upright, God-fearing folk of the sort that are rare in Malibu. But a combination of economic change and disastrous social policies is turning a rural idyll into a rural ghetto. A president who really cared about the heartland would devote a little serious thought to its problems, rather than just treat it as a backdrop for his re-election campaign.
It's painfully obvious that the writer thinks he has "been to America" because he once spent a weekend in NYC or LA, and perhaps talked to somebody who had a cousin who once visited the Hamptons. His characterization of the rest of this country as a homogenous "heartland" (read "flyover country") makes his opinion worthless.
And Brits complain because some Americans don't know where the Home Counties are . . . ?!? At least we don't write condescendingly about them for public consumption . . .
That's now the proper way of doing research. The proper way is to go by the county by county votes between algore and Bush. In the counties that voted for the wooden puppet, a person is thirteen times more likely to be murdered than in the counties that voted for Bush.
Backdrop for his re-election?
At his ranch, George W. Bush is where he would be, doing what he would be doing, year round, if he weren't President.
Suffer, cretin!
True Blue Americans
By Paul Krugman
New York Times Editorial
May 7, 2002
Remember how hard New York's elected representatives had to fight to get $20 billion in aid for the stricken city ‹ aid that had already been promised? Well, recently Congress agreed to give farmers $180 billion in subsidies over the next decade. By the way, the population of New York City is about twice as large as America's total farm population.
I've been a stern critic of the Bush administration, but this is one case where Democrats in the Senate were the lead villains. To its credit, the administration initially opposed an increase in farm subsidies, though as in the case of steel protection, it didn't take long before political calculation trumped the administration's alleged principles. But politics aside, maybe the farm bill debacle will help us, finally, to free ourselves from a damaging national myth: that the "heartland," consisting of the central, relatively rural states, is morally superior to the rest of the country.
You've heard the story many times: the denizens of the heartland, we're told, are rugged, self-reliant, committed to family; the inhabitants of the coast are whining yuppies. Indeed, George W. Bush has declared that he visits his stage set ‹ er, ranch ‹ in Crawford to "stay in touch with real Americans." (And what are those of us who live in New Jersey ‹ chopped liver?)
But neither the praise heaped on the heartland nor the denigration of the coasts has any basis in reality.
I've done some statistical comparisons using one popular definition of the heartland: the "red states" that ‹ in an election that pitted both coasts against the middle ‹ voted for Mr. Bush. How do they compare with the "blue states" that voted for Al Gore?
Certainly the heartland has no claim to superiority when it comes to family values. If anything, the red states do a bit worse than the blue states when you look at indicators of individual responsibility and commitment to family. Children in red states are more likely to be born to teenagers or unmarried mothers ‹ in 1999, 33.7 percent of babies in red states were born out of wedlock, versus 32.5 percent in blue states. National divorce statistics are spotty, but per capita there were 60 percent more divorces in Montana than in New Jersey.
And the red states have special trouble with the Sixth Commandment: the murder rate was 7.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in the red states, compared with 6.1 in the blue states, and 4.1 in New Jersey.
But what's really outrageous is the claim that the heartland is self-reliant. That grotesque farm bill, by itself, should put an end to all such assertions; but it only adds to the immense subsidies the heartland already receives from the rest of the country. As a group, red states pay considerably less in taxes than the federal government spends within their borders; blue states pay considerably more. Over all, blue America subsidizes red America to the tune of $90 billion or so each year.
And within the red states, it's the metropolitan areas that pay the taxes, while the rural regions get the subsidies. When you do the numbers for red states without major cities, you find that they look like Montana, which in 1999 received $1.75 in federal spending for every dollar it paid in federal taxes. The numbers for my home state of New Jersey were almost the opposite. Add in the hidden subsidies, like below-cost provision of water for irrigation, nearly free use of federal land for grazing and so on, and it becomes clear that in economic terms America's rural heartland is our version of southern Italy: a region whose inhabitants are largely supported by aid from their more productive compatriots.
There's no mystery about why the heartland gets such special treatment: it's a result of our electoral system, which gives states with small populations ‹ mainly, though not entirely, red states ‹ disproportionate representation in the Senate, and to a lesser extent in the Electoral College. In fact, half the Senate is elected by just 16 percent of the population.
But while this raw political clout is a fact of life, at least we can demand an end to the hypocrisy. The heartland has no special claim to represent the "real America." And the blue states have a right to ask why, at a time when the federal government has plunged back into deficit, when essential domestic programs are under assault, a small minority of heavily subsidized Americans should feel that they are entitled to even more aid.
Here is one response to Krugman's screed:
KRUGMAN SEES RED
THE GREAT RED VERSUS BLUE DEBATE RAGES ON
By: W. James Antle III
Libertarian commentator James Ostrowski had an excellent piece on the Mises Institute’s website that belatedly called my attention to an obnoxious New York Times op-ed by economist Paul Krugman entitled "True Blue Americans."
The latter column was the latest attempt by a Democratic partisan to make sweeping moral judgments about the states colored red on the famous USA Today electoral map - indicating that they voted for Republican George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election - and compare them negatively to the virtuous residents of the blue-colored states that voted for Democrat Al Gore. The most infamous example was Paul Begala’s MSNBC.com article that basically smeared red-state voters as racists and lynch-mob members, but Krugman has decided to weigh in on the red versus blue debate a year and a half later.
Krugman, you might recall, was once known for his economic writings and he often effectively debunked urban myths regarding international trade. Since he has delved into political commentary for The New York Times he has descended into shrill Democratic polemics that seem to find Republicans, the Bush administration and their corporate allies behind every evil.
This op-ed piece started promisingly, with Krugman opposing the recent increase in farm subsidies and pointing out the key role Senate Democrats played in securing $180 billion in farm-state and corporate welfare over the next ten years. (He is also admittedly right that President Bush caved on the farm-subsidies increase.) Unfortunately, he simply used the agricultural subsidies issue as a springboard for jumping on the red states and the article quickly deteriorated into another tired Democrat screed.
Krugman’s thesis is that the red states - as a proxy for conservative Republicans who voted for Bush - are not really as self-reliant, family-oriented and law-abiding as they are cracked up to be. Without citation, he rattles off some statistics comparing the red states and the blue states that seem to show more crime, divorce, illegitimacy and government dependency in the former than the latter. He triumphantly asserts that the blue states subsidize the red states "to the tune of $90 billion or so each year," implying that hypocritical Republicans are really living off the toil of Democrats.
Ostrowski, who like this writer lives in a blue state, questioned Krugman’s analysis. Krugman argued that the murder rate in the red states was 7.4 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 6.1 per 100,000 in the blue states and 4.1 in the economist’s home state of New Jersey. Ostrowski rightly wondered what would happen if you looked at cities and counties rather than states.
This is a key observation. After all, Missouri was a red state but the murders largely take place in St. Louis, which went Democratic. Georgia was a red state but the rural and suburban areas that made it so have much lower murder rates than Democratic Atlanta. In Krugman’s New Jersey, surely there are more murders in Democratic Newark than there are in some of the rural areas of the state that vote Republican. To quote Ostrowski, "The places with the fewest Republican votes - such as the inner city - have the highest rates of murder. Focusing on states as opposed to localities obscures this obvious fact."
Were the Gore voters really more family-friendly than the Bush voters? A look at some less misleading data would suggest the answer is no. According to CNN, Bush beat Gore among married voters generally by 53 percent to 44 percent and among voters who were married with children by 56 percent to 41 percent. Bush also beat Gore among the most religiously observant voters, who tend to have the most conservative attitudes about family values. Bush took 63 percent of voters who attend religious services more than once a week and 57 percent of those who do so weekly; Gore won 54 percent of those who seldom attend religious services and 61 percent of those who never do.
Bush carried 54 percent of the white vote but only 9 percent of the black vote and 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 1999, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was 27 percent among whites, 47 percent among Hispanics and 69 percent among blacks. Can Krugman seriously suggest that Gore voters had a lower out-of-wedlock birth rate when he carried 90 percent of the demographic group whose rate was highest?
As far as the Gore voters paying the bills while Bush voters collect, support for the GOP ticket was inversely proportional to income based on six income brackets ranging from incomes under $15,000 to incomes over $100,000. Gore won 57 percent of the votes of those earning less than $15,000 while Bush carried 54 percent of voters earning more than $100,000. Although many of the beneficiaries of corporate welfare, farm subsidies and non-means-tested entitlements are far from poor, it is also true that the highest income earners supply the most income tax revenue. In 1999 alone, the top 1 percent of income earners paid 33 percent of the personal income taxes collected. Ostrowski theorizes, "If red states are subsidized by blue states, the only rational explanation is that red persons in blues states are subsidizing blue persons in red states."
There is probably something to this. Consider that Bush carried every Southern state, including Gore’s Tennessee and Bill Clinton’s Arkansas. These states nevertheless have very large black populations that vote heavily Democratic. These are Democratic voters living in states that went Republican in the presidential election who have higher rates of poverty and out-of-wedlock births.
One aspect of the blue/red state divide that Krugman curiously does not expound upon is that by voting for politicians who will expand the redistributive powers of the federal government, many blue state voters are actually voting against their economic self-interest. Democrats dominate New Jersey’s congressional delegation - and Republicans who have represented New Jersey in recent decades have largely been liberals like the late Clifford Chase and Millicent Fenwick, along with Rep. Marge Roukema - yet Krugman observes that they still pay more in taxes than they receive in services from the federal government. No matter how many federal projects Ted Kennedy brings home, Massachusetts’s voters are still net taxpayers to the federal government.
None of this should be interpreted as some simple-minded "red states good, blue states bad" mantra. There is great variety within the states and within the demographic groups profiled in this article. If you want to see complex demographic information distorted to score cheap political points, please read Paul Krugman instead.
One reason for vacationing in the Heartland is that people don't take you for a trivial popinjay like Blair or Clinton.
And if Bush's vacationing in Crawford makes people think better of the Heartland, it'll do more than anything the Economist could do to improve things.
There's too much malicious glee at the Heartland's troubles in this article, though. The "concern" the Economist expresses looks like a smiling mask, through which nastiness can be expressed.
I thought Bush was at Kennebunkport, though.
The Economist is a bit late with this article. Rural poverty was far worse in certain pockets when I was a young pup in college circa 1970 and visited some of these areas out of curiousity. Some of those Appalachian Kentucky counties have been largely transformed, as I saw with my own eyes when I revisted them about 5 years ago. The Deliverance motif had disappeared. In any event, the subsidy to rural America was far more signficant back then than now, and has been since FDR's time, except for some of those disgraceful subsidies to rich farmers. The article also fails to mention the much lower cost of living in much of rural America. The piece in short in rather pathetic.
And just which California central valley county would be a candidate for one of the ten poorest in the nation. That one throws me for a loop. Maybe Jim or Saundra can chime in on that.
An illegitimate Senate Majority leader who really cared about the heartland would devote a little serious thought to permitting much needed reforms make it to the legislative floor, rather than block every meaningful reform to make the President look bad, thereby helping the re-election campaigns of like-minded Democrats.
The writer needs to learn where the constipation really originates.
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