Hypocritical Southern Governors

Case in point - the governors of the states that said something about refusing some of the stimulus were all from states that take far more federal money than they pay back. These states (and other states with lots of oil or gas) tend to elect Republicans.  Not sure why that is - but it seems to easier to paint yourself as a victim if you are dependent.  These people seem convinced they earned what they were freely given and that somehow Democrats are trying to take something away from them - it only makes sense in an upside down world.  And just like spoiled trust fund babies who have squandered their fortunes, they cry loudest just at the point that you are saving their sorry asses. That's what's happening now.

Bobby Jindal and his ilk remind me of isolationists just before WWII - they don't or refuse to understand that Obama and the rest of us have no choice, it's go forward or die.  With them at the helm, we watch out economy and citizens sink under the waves, while standing on the deck loudly proclaiming the fiscal virtue of non-intervention.

The politics of ignorance has its costs - it will drive smart people away.  The US has become a country with almost all of the innovation/productivity growth on the 2 coasts (with a few decidedly urban pockets in the middle - Denver, Austin, Chicago, etc.), clustered around the most interesting places - NYC, Boston, SF, Seattle, Portland, LA, Miami, etc., while the politics are driven by the middle, interior west and south - these places have hobbled innovation in almost any field other than marketing or minerals extraction because they cannot accept ideas that challenge their orthodoxies.

Free association - People who missed the 70's in NYC missed the most creative time we ever had, and now I think everyone young gets that (and so do retirees and rich people) and want to be part of the urban miracle, somehow - and it all happened with a horrible crime and drug problem.

Response to Stewart Gardner - what are Republicans up to?

I keep coming back to the basic problem – they are not intellectually honest.  The basic premises that: (1) markets work by themselves; and (2) making the rich richer benefits everyone have each been convincingly refuted (if they weren't already).  Republicans' nihilistic view that government is bad for, and bad at, all things other than defense is not only unsupported by anything but ideology, but manifestly irrelevant in light of the private sector failures, since large swaths of the private sector are now substantially dependent on the government.  In fact, trashing the very government Republicans are asking to run (which the entire Reagan era Republican doctrine has been based on), has proven disastrously corrosive to the functioning of our agencies, and now our entire society - it's no better than trashing business, but it's much more commonplace and virulent.  And the view that fiscal stimulus/government spending is always (ipso facto) a bad thing is contrary to history.  So they are left with a bunch of ranting, using bogeyman words like “socialism” and “government waste” promoted by deeply irresponsible people.   There is little analysis other than pre-Depression classical economics - nor any prescription that I have heard that will do anything but exacerbate problems for people without jobs or health insurance and further threaten the social consensus of post-war America.  And, despite the nostalgia - it’s not the early 80’s anymore - the simple removal of regulation and lowering of taxes is no longer an option (not that those prescriptions really worked or were even followed - what worked was Paul Volcker).  The Republican thinking has become nothing other than rooting for a bad result from Democratic policies; that is sick – really, diseased – thinking, as is the politics that naturally flows from it.