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The Growing Divide: Red States Versus Blue States

edited August 2020 in Off-Topic
Pretty much says it all with one graph that has a pull-down menu for household income, poverty rate, education, GDP per capita, uninsured, employment: gppreview.com/2020/02/21/growing-divide-red-states-vs-blue-states/

Comments

  • Let's not let actual facts confuse this discussion, please. We don't want to make anyone uncomfortable here by citing reliable sources.
  • edited August 2020
    Interesting. It would be helpful if cost of living differences were factored into their analysis. An analysis by the Goldwater Institute looks at this issue. Here is an excerpt that hints at how incorporating this factor into the analysis may impact and complicate evaluating the red state vs. blue state numbers.
    Note that once states’ per capita personal incomes are adjusted for cost of living to reflect purchasing power, the rankings radically change. Only two northeastern states, Connecticut and New Jersey, remain in the top 10. Formerly middle-ranked Texas jumps 18 spots to number 7. Oklahoma, once ranked 29th and 13 spots behind Colorado, rises to 12th, just behind Colorado. Oklahoma outranks Massachusetts, which had ranked third. California drops to 43rd, behind Mississippi’s 39th. Hawaii now takes the bottom spot, and a distant bottom at that. Figure 1 shows how the fortunes of different states change depending on whether or not personal income is adjusted for cost of living.
    image

    https://goldwaterinstitute.org/cost-of-living/



  • I won't dispute your figures, but aren't we talking about two different things here? GDP is looking at a state's productivity, the other is looking at how well individuals living in a state share in that productivity. Or am I looking at this incorrectly? Frankly, I'm not surprised re CA because of the large number of very low paid workers occupied in agricultural labor, and the very large amount that agricultural industry contributes to the gross GDP figures.
  • edited August 2020
    The Goldwater Institute analysis suggests taking cost of living into account may be relevant when evaluating at least 3 red state vs blue state factors looked at by Georgetown.

    Regarding median household income comparisons, the Goldwater Institute article indicates:
    ...reducing the cost of living by 10 percent has the same impact on people’s standard of living as a 10 percent increase in their incomes.
    Cost of living differences may also be relevant when evaluating the importance of educational level. Per their analysis:
    The seeming advantage that states with more college graduates appear to have is drowned out by their high cost of living.
    Finally, it may also impact Federal Poverty Level (FPL) blue state vs. red state comparisons.
    The FPL for a family of four in the lower 48 states is $24,600, regardless of whether that family lives in San Francisco, New York City, Oklahoma City, or Fort Worth....Table 4 shows the four-person family FPL for each state adjusted for that state’s cost of living or purchasing power. The average of these values for Washington, D.C., and the 20 blue states that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 is $21,078; they have a relatively high cost of living and the lower number reflects the fact that $24,600 buys less than in other states. The average for the 30 red states that voted for Donald Trump, with their lower cost of living, is 24 percent higher, at $26,239.
    So, perhaps it would be helpful for Georgetown to consider the cost of living factor or to at least discuss why it is not considered......


  • edited August 2020
    @davfor The problem with cost of living is it disregards the ultimate impact of the state as a whole economically on the entire nation's GDP. It also assumes that everyone has the same wants and needs with regard to, say, housing. It also tends to disregard the benefits for instance higher taxation provides in the form of public services that can be vital to many communities. For instance the cost of living calculation in many red states can be low if they have poor infrastructure and educational institutions. But many people want good infrastructure and educational instituions. Many people want or need to live in a 24-7 city like New York where you can go to work at midnight and still come home on a train. Yet a cost of living calculation will rarely look too closely at the value of those public services. Things are more expensive in big liberal cities because more people want to live in them than small red state towns with poor infrastructure, and supply and demand on things like real estate drives up prices. This is especially so for young educated wealthy people.

    https://usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2019-10-21/these-states-are-home-to-the-most-millennial-millionaires
    California is home to 44% of the nation's millennial millionaires, between the ages of 23 and 28, who are concentrated in Silicon Valley. New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, Virginia, Illinois and Maryland round out the top 10 states.
  • FWIW.....

    There are many people who prefer to live away from the major metropolitan areas. It depends on their priorities. A representative sample of people from Laramine, Wyoming will undoubtedly have a somewhat different set of core values than a representative sample of people from New York City. Looking at purchasing power provides a common frame of reference for the "stuff" part of the equation across those differing groups of people. (Likewise, the Georgetown Public Policy Review staff brings a different set of core values to its viewpoint and selection of well-being metrics than would the Goldwater Institute staff if it were to produce a similar tool.)

    A couple more random thoughts.....GDP is a measure of how much stuff is produced by a country. It can be expressed as GDP per capita. There is a value based environmental preservation argument which I agree with -- as well as other value based arguments -- that favor deemphasizing GDP per capita as a primary measure of well-being. Also, comparing GDP per capita across people who live in different parts of the country requires accounting for cost of living differences. Depending on the magnitude of those differences, a typical person living in a lower GDP per capita part of the country might have a higher standard of living than a typical person living in a higher GDP per capita part of the country.
  • I don't disagree with you. The problem I have is the constant attacks from certain MFO members on Democratic politicians running Democratic states and cities as producing no economic value or being poorly run from an economic sense when there is so much tangible proof that the opposite is the case.
  • edited August 2020
    Repetition, not statistics, all too often produces undeniable, irrefutable, universally accepted virtual reality truth. Such truths cannot be contested with any amount of data, common sense or investing acumen. Can you contest the belief of a religion, ideology or mythology? It isn't worth trying unless you enjoy it.
  • I expect that their data are sound, but man, you should read other things on the Goldwater Inst site, including their mission statement and their legal work.
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