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Comment by ciarannolan | Hacker News Reader

The "liberal states bad" trope has popped up on conservative media in the last year or so, so you'll see a lot more of it on places like HN.

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Yeah, pretty much all of the best state economies are extremely liberal (1). I think the anti-tax sentiment on HN is from people who make a lot of money and then realize they have to pay taxes. They attribute their success entirely to themselves and then whine about giving anything back to the environment that enabled them. California certainly has giant problems but don't let it distract you from the big picture.

(1) https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/economy

I'd like to see the p-value on states' political lean vs the size of their economy. Looking at the top 10 state economies on your list, 3 are swing states and 3 are red states, leaving only 4 (far from "pretty much all") as blue states. Even looking 10 states further down, into the top 20, adds 5 red states, 3 swing states, and only 2 blue states.

Your framing of the list is more than a bit disingenuous. 4/5 of the top economies are blue. 6/10 are blue, 1/10 is a swing state, and 3/10 are red (1). When you dive a bit deeper, you can also see that all 3 red states border much bigger and richer blue states (Utah -> Colorado, Idaho -> Washington/Oregon, Arizona -> California). Perhaps a better way is to break it down by district (2). If you look at the house of representatives and sum up the GDP by party, democrats account for ~$10T and republicans account for ~$6T.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

(2) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/15/charts-democrats-represent-m...

What if we looked at things like tax rate and cost of living?

People make more money in California, but they also spend more on housing, taxes, food, gas, etc.

If you look at quality of life indicators instead of economic strength, California certainly falls more than a bit but the red/blue divide grows even larger (1). From purely a quality of life standpoint, 8 of the best 10 are blue and 8 out of the worst 10 are red.

(1) https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings

Trying to build rankings of something like 'quality of life' seems pretty dense

Half of the top ten in that list cannot be called "extremely liberal" (or for some, even moderately liberal) -- Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Florida, and Arizona; even fewer in the next ten.

I don't disagree with you vis-a-vis the anti-tax sentiment, but you're making a strong claim that extremely liberal state government policies drive economies, and that's a reach.

4 out of the top 5 are extremely liberal. In the top ten, let's calculate by population.

Blue: 66.8M (5.7 + 7.6 + 39.5 + 4.2 + 6.8 + 3)

Red: 12.3M (3.2 + 1.8 + 7.3)

Swing (aka Florida): 21.5M

This can be a bit confusing so let's skip straight to the point. If you take the house of representatives and add up GDP by district, democrats account for $10.2T and republicans account for $6.2T (1). The differences don't stop there. Republican districts have slower economic growth, less skilled labor, less educated workers, and a host of other bad indicators.

(1) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/15/charts-democrats-represent-m...

Interesting discussion. Take some of the districts shown in your source: NY-10, a Democratic district, is like half of Manhattan plus bits of Brooklyn. PA-13, a Republican district, is 98% rural Pennsylvania with some small towns thrown in.

Rural districts lean Republican, and urban districts lean Democratic. I'd wager that the bad indicators you mention are better explained by the rural/urban divide more so than political leanings. A central business district of a major city is going to have better economic growth, higher-skilled and more educated labor, and a host of other good indicators compared to farmland.

I agree there is correlation between dense urban areas (which are more likely to lean Democratic) having a higher GDP output and rural areas (which are more likely to lean Republican) having a lower GDP output. However, you would need to provide stronger evidence that there is any causality established there.

I'd say the causality runs the other way around: people in high density living situations (which for better or worse have been the primary driver of GDP growth since the industrial revolution) are amenable to more government regulation, simply by virtue of the problems caused by that same density -- people encounter "this is why we can't have nice things" kinds of situations, and want regulation to counter those, a lot more often when squeezed into big cities. Therefore those places lean Democratic in the US. The opposite applies for rural areas. I don't think you can claim that you could take a rural (and therefore Republican-leaning) area, turn the voters there Democratic, and cause economic growth to happen, without first turning it into a dense city.

The causality is certainly confusing and not clear cut. It does seem that these small towns are in desperate need of liberal economic policies yet they vote the opposite. Rural areas need investment in education, infrastructure, and job retraining. If you turned Republican towns blue, you'd almost certainly help their cause.

I am by no means conservative but the taxes on regular people in California are so high because the taxes on longtime landowners are low. And I also don’t think the taxes are being spent well enough to justify them. It’s also quite a stretch to call anything about obstructionist NIMBYism “liberal”

Also many of the people paying the highest taxes in CA are not even from there (executives, tech workers, entertainment workers), which kind of breaks down the argument of giving back to the environment that produced you.

I would be perfectly happy with paying income and sales taxes as high as they are in California if they were assessed more fairly (no low taxes because your grandparents lived here) and if I felt like I got enough out of public services.

> are not even from there (executives, tech workers, entertainment workers), which kind of breaks down the argument of giving back to the environment that produced you.

This doesn't make sense. Are you saying people should only pay taxes in the state they were born in forever? That's not how taxation works.

Not exactly, what I’m saying is I don’t buy any argument that the taxes are so high in CA because they need to be to provide the services that allow it to have a good economy. The only possible exception to this is the UC system. Other than that I think California has a good economy mostly as a result of its location, size, and geography

Man, if ever there was a proposition that need to be repealed. I lived in NorCal for 22 years. Prop 13 is why schools in non-rich neighborhoods are literally collapsing. There are schools in South Sacto that have been holding classes in "temporary" trailers for over 20 years. What a huge mistake 1978 made.

> Prop 13 is why schools in non-rich neighborhoods are literally collapsing.

Let's say Prop 13 was repealed. Rich neighborhoods would still get more property tax revenue than poor neighborhoods, because the properties in rich neighborhoods are worth more.

If you want to solve the disparity in school funding you need to stop basing it on the values of the homes in the neighborhoods surrounding the schools.

Repealing Prop 13 will give schools in poor areas more money than they have now, but they will never get as much money as schools in rich areas as long as the property tax funding model persists.

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