To concentrate on race is overly reductive and doesn’t get the cause/effect analysis correct. You’re evaporating the experience of every person in MN or VT who doesn’t fit the dominant mold who still worked hard for and benefited from this.
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This is the story of the last 50 years in the US, since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”. Divide and conquer. The natural question is whether homogeneity makes this harder to pull off when there’s fewer fracture lines available to exploit? And before the PC police get all up on me, the strategy for success is NOT homogeneity, but figuring out how to get people to see past their superficial differences and see who’s pissing down ALL their backs!
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Well DUH.
All that fuss and bother, just to get to a point that most people here would already find obvious?
Um, thanks for playing, I guess.
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Venezuela was run by a leftist version of trump. Screaming about the press, etc. It is also an oil state, and oil prices went down. Also it was a pretty bad place to live for most of its people before Chavez, while under a right plutocratic government.
I think the lesson there is don’t let crazy people who can’t face facts run your country, regardless of their ideological slant.
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I’m sure it’s not the only thing, but it certainly is a larger drive to increase the state’s available capital. And the second or third paragraph kind of implies you tax the rich and spend on social programs:
Last fall, I wrote about the strange case of Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, a left-wing billionaire heir to the Target fortune who came to power and reversed his Republican predecessors’ Reagonomic idiocy, instead raising taxes on rich people, increasing public spending, and creating shared prosperity for the people of Minnesota.
But like @gracchus said,
another large part of the balancing the budge comes from how you are spending that money. The article never goes into if programs that previous Republican governors cut back or eliminated have been restored…I make assumptions that previous governors did that just based on what current Republican lawmakers do. The application of funds is also going to vary by state not just in terms of services and programs to help people but in terms of infrastructure and state level spending to keep everything working.
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The top 20% of the US population currently gets 51% of the total income. The top 1% currently get 15% of the total income. The bottom 60% of the population get 30% of total income.
We can ONLY get tax revenue from higher income people, they have most of the money.
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You seem to be making the initial assumption that this is a unicorn that most likely cannot be replicated in other places unless someone proves otherwise to you. That is certainly a valid point of view but doesn’t seem likely that the similarities may outweigh the differences and that trying this elsewhere may just be to the benefit of all (most (more))?
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Speaking as an adopted Minnesotan: The Minnesota-vs-Wisconsin situation is certainly worth analyzing–aside from being neighbors, the two states have similar demographic-geographic-political layouts (strong urban/rural divides) and similar histories with good-government and union-friendly movements. And Minnesota came quite close to flipping to Trump last fall, and did give control of the legislature to its quite-conservative GOP, leaving Dayton the only barrier to the predictable wave of reactionary proposals. (The big fight is going to be over tax “reform” and what to do with the budget surplus.) The political-leadership and -policy factors represented by Dayton/Walker and Dayton/Pawlenty sure look significant to me.
About the state’s demographics: Over the last decade or two we have seen a considerable influx of non-northern-European people, famously including our large Somali immigrant/refugee population, and those folks are not always warmly welcomed in outstate communities. (Try Googling up some MPR stories–there was one on this morning about Worthington.) Acceptance of diversity comes slowly in outstate areas, even while the Twin Cities sends the first Somali-American to Congress. But I’ve read (and lived through) enough history to believe that immigrant/not-like-us groups do indeed eventually get accepted–since this is St. Patrick’s Day, one has only to read about the Irish in New York City, 1800-1890 or so. (There’s a splendid book, Five Points, by Tyler Anbinder. BTW, think about the author’s name and what it suggests about assimilation.) Of course, we first have to get through spasms of nativism and related anxieties.
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That’s not true at all - companies and corporations have more money than all the people. Frankly getting taxes from them would fix most of the problems this country currently has.
I mean Caterpillar is being charged now with using fancy accounting to avoid paying 2 BILLION in taxes. I’m pretty sure that they aren’t alone - and that if you got that kind of cash flowing back into the coffers it would help the country.
I never understand it frankly - real estate taxes are the most popular way for local governments to cover costs (roads/schools etc.) - yet they fall over themselves to give a big company tax free land for 40+ years to move in - and then try to raise the property taxes (on everyone else) or sales tax or some other tax to make up the shortfall.
It’s economic stupid. And it only works as a strongarm tactic because so many places do it.
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Yes. Even though there might be fewer of them in Kentucky than there are in Minnesota, without raising taxes on wealthy Kentuckians and corporations (i.e. abandoning the discredited religion of trickle-down economics) you won’t have enough funds to apply to Kentucky’s version of Minnesota’s programmes.
I’m OK taking him at his word in this case.
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No doubt it is easier to create and manage a monoculture, but evidence has shown that it is not very robust or sustainable. So I think there is no advantage to pointing that out as a path of least resistance. Ironically, social monoculture is often sought by those who claim to value the meritocracy and competition of unchecked capitalism - so long as there is a minimal framework in place which preserves an advantage for their group. Why take such pains to deregulate business and push for laissez faire markets, only to resort to gerrymandering, exception, and exclusion?
How I think people get fooled is not that there aren’t any differences between different groups of people, but in what the actual differences are and their significance. That’s a weapon in the hands of any group willing to use ignorance and hate to push their agenda.
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Mark Blyth the political economist wrote a book on this. Basically you are shrinking the economy, more people are collecting unemployment and using govt services but paying less taxes. Greece is the perfect example, the austerity imposed by the Eurogroup shrunk the Greece GDP by 30%, this is even more than the great depression.
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We are primarily an urban country, though (as how the population divides, not how the landmass is filled), somewhat more so than the USA (surprisingly enough).
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Yup - so I just did a bit of math - and here is the breakdown - by year - of how much the corporate income taxes were compared to personal income taxes.
This is to say - if the government made $100 from Bob and $80 from Walmart - then they made 80% of the taxes from Walmart. (numbers are from: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/amount-revenue-source)
I did this by decade … does anyone care to make a correlation between this list and why the country feels so damn broke?
1934 - 86%
1944 - 75%
1954 - 71%
1964 - 48%
1974 - 32%
1984 - 19%
1994 - 25%
2004 - 24%
2014 - 22%
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Planet Money did a podcast on Kansas and even many in the business community were opposed to Brownback’s policies of cutting. So when a school closed in a town and the kids had to be bused to another school, people in the town like the restaurant owners where the teachers used to dine said great I pay less taxes but there’s no business. Brownback is very unpopular, I understand, but still hopes to be proven right over time.
You can see the same experiment with states that have raised minimum wage compared to republican states that haven’t. It puts the job killing argument to rest.
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According to Mark Blyth, of the gov’t revenue the share of taxes paid by corporations was 30% in the 50s, 20% in the 70s and is now around 2%
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So high? I’m surprised that it’s not a negative number. Then again, it’s not counting paybacks, just revenue, right?
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Personal and Business Income Taxes are not the only revenue that the gov’t makes - it’s listed in the link I posted. My % was what business paid as a percentage of the personal income taxes. If you look at that list - you’ll note that in some years business paid more than people - (the last year that happened was 1943).
That hasn’t happened in 77 years.
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The place it gets really scary is when monocultures start reaching outside their borders to find the “others” that they claim are causing all the problems. Sometimes it’s hard to parse the difference between “Lebensraum” and “war on terror”. It’s always someone else’s fault.
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This. It’s not about “culture” or “homogeneity” or any other of the dogwhistles above: it’s whether or not the leader comes to the conclusion that "[those] rules don’t apply to the president. "
Once that happens, left-right ideological positions don’t matter: for most people, things are going to go to shit. It’s why you can have good kings and bad kings, good chiefs and bad chiefs: long before we had the idea of left and right there was the understanding that it all depended on how much the leader was in it for the country / tribe, and how much for themselves.
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