P-I Focus: Red and blue and the color of money
Only five blue states are net recipients of federal subsidies; only two red states are net payers of federal taxesBy ERIC SCIGLIANO
November's presidential election sparked a boom in amateur political geography. You remember the maps that flew like rumors of war over the Internet. First, there was the plaintive spectacle of the election outcome: the blue-tagged Democratic states clinging to the Pacific, Great Lakes and North Atlantic shores, beachheads of civilization wrapped around a vast red wilderness.
One version showed how closely today's blue states matched the free states and territories before the Civil War while the red matched Dixie and the slave territories. Another, weighted for population, showed the red and blue turfs nearly equal (just like the Bush-Kerry vote), with populous blue states such as New York and California swollen like balloons, squeezing the shriveled red strongholds of the Plains and Rockies.
Another showed the United States broken up, Yugoslavia-style, into the various cultural and ideological divisions that this election seemed to reflect: Cascadia, Dixie, Yankeeland. One even showed the blue states as southern arms of a "United States of Canada," with the red bloc renamed "Jesusland."
Even as they chuckled over these maps, blue Americans fumed in ways once reserved for Dixiecrat rebels, neo-Nazis fleeing to Idaho and other fringe separatists. You probably heard the grumbling; perhaps you even vented a little yourself. In 2000, you could blame the outcome on butterfly ballots, Ralph Nader and the "compassionate conservative" stealth campaign. But November 2004 offered fewer excuses, and it posed the question: What if a large section of this country really cares more about putting God in government, keeping gays out of marriage chapels and cutting rich folks' taxes than about fiscal, environmental and geopolitical sanity? What if what we've got is what they actually want? And what if the country's relatively liberal, cosmopolitan and secular regions are paying through the nose to be captives in a political madhouse?
Follow the money, in this as in all touchy issues. Regional inequities -- who pays and who gets -- go back far and deep in U.S. history. One-way taxation without representation made the colonies rebel against Britain; the fight over whether the slave-holding South or anti-slavery North would prevail in the Western territories led to the Civil War. Discontent has bubbled up since then, whenever this state or that region lands in disfavor for federal spending, taxes and tariffs. But it's reaching a new boil now, thanks to two trends.
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