The list includes Louisiana, Texas, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Colorado, Oregon, and New York. Of that list, I would be dismayed only for the last three, the others? I couldn’t push them out the door fast enough.
What’s most curious is that most of these states consume a lot of federal money. If they left the union, life would become very difficult for them. Just imagine the new tollways that would open up on their now-not-federally-supported-segments of the Eisenhower Interstate System. You thought the NYS Thruway was an expensive axle-mangler, just wait until Albany has to figure out how to fix it all on their own.
I think we can all say with a fair amount of humor, that Texas can leave whenever it damn well likes. Stop posturing and threatening, just do it already. I can’t wait to see how OPEC deals with The Great Christian Domain of Texas. That’ll be hilarious.
Hurricanes that slam into Galveston will now be regarded as Reality TV as “Those poor fools in Texas” try to cope without the rest of us. A lot of these red states think they can exist outside of all socialized connections with the other states and the Union, and I think they should be allowed to leave to feel what being truly alone feels like.
How fast they would rush back. And my, what sort of concessions they’d have to part with just to get back in. Just ask South Carolina about secession. It’s been more than a hundred years and they still haven’t recovered from the last time. But you never know, it might be different this time. (no, it won’t, it’ll be worse)
So lets say the gulf states leave and take North Dakota with them that would account for about 80% of our oil production? Throw in Indiana and there goes 1/4 of your coal and that giant natural gas pocket it sits on top of. I am sure the good people in L.A. will love paying $9.00 per gallon for gas since most of our gas is refined in that area or the people in Boston will just be super happy paying $1000 per month to heat their house in the winter! How about you enjoy a $5
orange or a $200 plate of shrimp?
These people are making a point. "Stop taking my hard earned money and handing it to people refuse to work". Mit screwed up and said that we are going to put you back to work…Why? Why would they want that? They get cheap housing, a free phone, free healthcare, discounted internet, food stamps, free school lunch and breakfast for their kids (and that is 100% NOT the kids fault by the way, but it is what they are learning to do), free this, free that, why? Why work for those things? Our country voted for free stuff, not pride, not hard work.
I own a business and have great jobs just waiting for people who want to work. $14-16 per hour jobs! Yes, it is hard work, it is dirty work and what do it get? People show up, take the jobs, I spend money training them and they quit or do something to get fired within 2-3 months so they can go back to playing XBox and collecting free stuff.
By the way, Texas is the 15th largest economy in the world. They would be just fine and we would have no choice but to buy their oil…and for quite a long time their refined oil products.
My point wasn't necessarily about the political argument surrounding welfare as much as it was about how we all need each other, socially, to do those things that must be done to make life better for us all. States that want to secede do not understand the larger context of their actions. Secession involves necessarily a new series of trade agreements between bordering states. If Texas, for example requires fresh drinking water from the Great Lakes Compact region, they will have to trade something they have and the Compact will have to determine what we are willing to sell our fresh water for, as an example. Plus for the states that abandon the Union, they'll have to take on all those services that the Feds have taken care of, so, hard winters, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes will require even more exchange of goods and services to compensate for assistance. No man is an island, and no state is an island either. If Texas were to leave the Union, as they are fond of posturing that they will do, then their interdependencies with other states will be much more complicated. They may have a lot of oil, or in some other states as you say, natural gas or coal resources, but without access to shipping it would be a challenge for these states to get the drilling equipment as well, so they can make good on their resources.
I don't engage with people who go out of their way to whine about socialized care programs because their arguments are always incredibly myopic and almost always come from an sense of unbearable greed, obnoxious heartlessness, and a general lack of human empathy to people who aren't as fortunate as others. I get it a lot from my conservative family members, especially when they say blanket phrases like "If they'd just get a job, they wouldn't need welfare!" Well, yes, that's obvious – but where are the jobs? Sometimes you can't find employment despite every effort; For conservatives these poor people are just parasites and nary a single thought is spent on whether or not lives are lost just because of economic misfortune. There is no pride in taking welfare and people are ashamed of doing so, but have no other choice. Conservatives never really go out of their way to find people who use these services so they are told by their media outlets and by each other what these people are like, they use various logical fallacies to magnify one instance of someone taking advantage of the system and then use that to denigrate the entire framework. There may be people who take advantage of the system, but for someone with a functioning sense of empathy, it's far better for ten people to misuse the system than for one person to starve to death through no fault of their own.
We will never see eye to eye on this. It is my conclusion that there are two different camps, and they are drawn on the political continuum between liberalism and conservatism. There is no middle ground, it is effectively a DMZ loaded with dead bodies and land mines. I do not seek to change your mind. I do not offer arguments to you to alter how you see the world. I simply try to live my life according to my ethics and morals and how I think the world should work, just like you. Because I offer no argument, there really is no room for a reply from this statement that I write. Consider it a billboard for this blog, you can rail at a billboard until you grow hoarse, but it will do no good. You will not change my mind.
Some would argue that this is unfair, that I am not giving my blog readers a place to express themselves and by effectively shutting down an argument and asserting that mine is the last word is the height of arrogance. You would be the definition of right. Nowhere on this blog do I state that I will behave in any particular way, so, as my partner is fond of saying, learn to cope.