Oklahoma Republicans are tearing themselves apart as they confront the economic wreckage of their policies

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/19/not-okie-dokie.html

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21st century dust bowl brought on by ignoramuses.

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Nearby Minnesota? I dare you to walk from one to the other.

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About 8 years ago, my wife and I road tripped with her brother down to Texas for his new job. Driving through Oklahoma was like travelling through another country. The one entire lane of the highway was covered with barrels–not because of road construction, mind you. But because it was so riddled with potholes that it was undrivable.

For dozens of miles.

They couldn’t fix it so they created a detour off that lane.

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Well, the voters. The GOP politicians know exactly what they’re doing, obeying the people that fund their campaigns and would rather loot the environment and hoard their gold than contribute to an economy that lifts all boats.

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Kansas already showed them the way. The conservative endgame is without police, fire, roads and schools. No more rural hospitals, even if you’re white. And Oklahoma said, “yeah, sign me up for some of that!”

It turns out when you relentlessly cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, revenues go down. Nobody could possibly have predicted this, except every single economist. Conservatives said, “we’ll show them book-larnin’ types,” and showed us the economists were right.

I was born in a nation that could put a man on the moon. Can you imagine that today?

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I’m from Oklahoma. The vast majority of the brighter people I went to high school left right after high school or in some cases college. No one wants to live there.

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As much as they will deny this, some on the right simple must have realized that this was always going to be the end game of their economic vision. It was way to obvious. And yet their answer still seems to be to double down on it. Before someone chimes in, I am very aware that the root of this economic “theory” is the enrichment of the donor class, but how in all the hells have to voters bought into being willing sacrifices on this altar???

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I’m sure they won’t fall victim to Sam Brownback’s prognosis for his equally failed policies in Kanas: “We just have to double down on these policies! They haven’t been in place long enough!”

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There’s some joke around the Internet that the Libertarian paradise with no government and lots of guns is Somalia.

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Don’t worry. Soon you’ll have a hard time telling the surface of the Earth from the surface of the moon anyway.

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Oh%20Snap

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I can think of one.

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The conservative endgame is the rich rebuilding their castles and sending the serfs out to die to avenge their imagined slights against the nobility’s peers.

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Roads Girdle the Globe (XTC):

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Conservatism can’t fail - it can only be failed.

/s

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Well yeah. Those are socialist programs and socialism is the devil.

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It’s like the Ayn Rand fans all got together and decided that the looters were the heroes of “Atlas Shrugged”. Because everything in that book is good, right.

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You mean it’s not just a few miles south of where 35E meets 35W? :wink:

(Although familiarity can breed contempt, my opinion of Burnsville really isn’t low enough to compare it to the shithole otherwise known as Oklahoma.)