Reduction of the fed may be the only way to ever meaningfully address national debt.
Illinois has the highest tax burden in the country. We're not Greece. We are paying through the nose for, well, everything. We get 95 cents on the dollar for our federal taxes, and we pay a lot of those.
Texas is a lower-tax state. It is, in some ways, better managed than Illinois. But it gets 20 cents back on every dollar it pays in federal taxes.
It seems to me that the reason not to bail out pension systems is that they're long-term unsustainable, and that they're mismanaged, and something has to be done to stop the bleeding. But it's hard to argue that bailing them out would be a redistributive injustice. We subsidize the low-tax red states.
(A comically similar microcosm of this debate occurs within Illinois, with rural Illinoisans regularly making noise about wanting to divest itself of Chicagoland. Go right ahead, Peoria!)
It's nearly impossible to leave a government you don't really approve of if they are transferring a large amount of money into your local economy.
> The Census numbers are much higher than the OECD numbers for a variety of reasons. In fact, the OECD income number of the US is only 59 percent of the Census number.
The adjustment they did was "moving all the medians of all the states down by 59%" but I don't think that is enough. A more appropriate way to compare things would have been figuring how what those "differentiating reasons" and deducing amounts for each of the states, or incrementing the other countries' median in the same way. The American Census could (for example) be counting every state's natural resources as part of each household's income. In that case, they should include Sweden's petrol reserves in that computation. With the disparate measurement methods and the simplistic adjustment, they are comparing apples to oranges.
To be clear, that adjustment can only affect the relative numbers across US states, not the overall average for US states. That is because all states are adjusted by the OECD number for the US. Presumably the OECD methodology is consistent within itself.
So maybe the Census includes oil resources and OECD doesn’t. Discounting the US numbers across the board to 59% may make Texas and California artificially look better than Mississippi. But the overall average of the US states would still correspond to the OECD number for the US, which presumably is computed the same way as for Sweden.
More on topic, those poor states that benefit from federal money would not have a very strong economy and they would not be able to do deficit spending on their own currency or pay for things through deficit spending. If Oregon, Washington and California formed a new country or joined Canada they'd be better off financially, because their tax drain to poor state america would end. I don't want a split but I'm starting to feel it will happen in my lifetime. I'm more than ok with helping the poorer states with their infrastructure needs, we are all in this together. But I'm tired of 15% of the population having control over the federal agenda through the senate.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Yes. There's a reason US dollars are accepted worldwide Zimbabwean dollars aren't.
Once states secede, they lose all the clout that comes from being part of the world's only superpower controlling the world's reserve currency. Southern states would be better off switching to Pesos than printing their own.
Russia, which has a similar GDP, didn't have any appreciable external debts denoted in rubles. They were denoted in dollars, pounds sterling or other hard currencies.
EDIT: https://medium.com/@jonathanusa/everything-you-know-about-th...
Germany, for example, has "state's rights." Religious people in Bavaria decided that government buildings should display crosses (https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/31/europe/bavaria-germany-crosse...) and folks in Berlin don't get to veto that. When German press asked Angela Merkel why she wouldn't order a nationwide COVID lockdown, she explained German federalism, and the German press (which is much smarter than the American press) nodded and moved on. India features states that differ quite significantly in their healthcare systems or social laws. In Switzerland, a country the size of Maryland, laws on same-sex marriage differ between cantons until national consensus was reached less than two years ago.
America is a country of 330 million people, and far more diverse than Germany or Switzerland. Why should we ignore the real need for flexibility and localism just because some people who are long dead abused federalism?
Different groups of people wanting to cooperate to some extent but not be micromanaged by other groups of people isn’t unique to Germany. Federalism keeps recurring because it solves a recurring human problem.
> I'm not making the argument Federal power is bad, the people who benefit from it the most are, and are grifting the system by intentionally subverting anything that would improve their people's situation.
I like to assume that people are acting rationally in their interest given their values and priorities. People disagree about what would “improve” their situation,” or what will be the real outcome of efforts undertaken to “improve the situation.” Last I checked people are moving from California to Texas, not the other way around. Let’s assume at the very least people rationally appreciate the trade offs of that.
> Look at the build back better plan, they screwed that up and most of our highways are out of their operating life spans by more than double the original life time.
And why do you assume that Build Back Better would address that problem? I used to be a transit fan. I dutifully road Amtrak and Metro and MARC to work for years. And you know what? I gave up, moved to the exurbs, and bought a big SUV. Because we can’t actually do infrastructure and we shouldn’t even try. My change of heart was bitterly confirmed true when I saw the BBB proposal for Amtrak (which last I checked planned to blow tens of billions of dollars without building any new track).
Being from Bangladesh, I don’t actually believe that all cultures equally good at all things. Clearly Americans just can’t do things that require large scale coordination. Instead of beating our heads against the wall about it, we should just try to restructure our society to avoid those weaknesses.
It's worth noting that the issue gets confused because of the makeup of the political coalitions in the US. Namely the party of "small government" is a coalition of social conservatives (who often are fine with government spending, so long as it's not forcing liberal social policy on them), and economic libertarians (who care deeply about low taxes and less business regulation, but aren't as sensitive to liberal social policy). The social conservatives bring the votes, but party has historically prioritized the policy of the libertarians.
Until relatively recently, it was actually pretty common for the states you speak of to send socially conservative Democrats to Congress. Over the last 15 or so years, the Republicans successfully exploited the compromises those Democrats were often forced to make with an officially socially-liberal party to defeat them electorally.
Also, as an anecdote, one of these states (North Dakota) could probably legitimately claim to be one of the most socialist states in the country. It literally has a couple major state-owned businesses.
If you took social issues off the table, I think you'll see those states behave much differently.
California did not want to secede. A Russian-linked group tried repeatedly over the 2016 to 2020 period to get an initiative for an independence referendum on to the ballot in the state, but never managed to qualify the initiative, much less pass the initiative calling for an independence referendum.
The analyses that draw this conclusion leave a lot out. By narrowing the discussion to spending, they ignore the many benefits of federal policy for corporations based in the big cities in a few states. A few industries come to mind that would make a lot less money if federal policy were different: banks, pharma, entertainment, and even technology.
We already see this with legal marijuana, there are multiple campaigns aimed to form interstate compacts without the consent of congress. Ultimately a situation where the federal government declines to enforce its legal authority will just lead to a defacto change in the supremacy clause of the US constitution.
The only situation I see where this would become problematic is if a state chose to stop sending tax dollars to the federal government. Even then, the federal government has levers to pull that would be tough for a state to circumvent except by exiting the dollar - which no state has any reason to do.
This is not generally how taxes work, though; instead, individuals and businesses send taxes to the federal government (and sometimes, also to their states), and the federal government returns a great deal of the money to the states and localities, directly or indirectly. Leaving the federal government wouldn't mean the states would stop sending the feds money, it means they would be completely unable to pay for all sorts of infrastructure and entitlements that they receive money from the federal government for.
Worst case scenario, I'd see some byzantine system of declarations required when doing something across state lines or people using "fed taxed" and "state taxed" financial institutions depending on their objectives. Given the current state of military affairs, a war over Rhode Island would be a complex endeavor - a war over Texas, California, or New York is a practical impossibility.
The state that tried to leave might find itself with a civil war as the two sides within it -- the majority of whom already believe that the other party represents the most mortal enemy imaginable -- duke it out for control.
The big item issues such as
- Federal bans on abortion
- Controversial Presidential elections
- A series of unfortunate Supreme court decisions
- Immigration
- Infrastructure spending
Are all issues which can be handled with a legal decoupling. If all sides remained notionally in Congress, then there is very little likelihood that Congress would address the matter. A sensible supreme court would leave it as a political issue for a few decades before declaring a defacto status as was done for West Virginia's statehood. For all intents and purposes, a de facto decoupling would look more like a return to State relationships prior to 1900 then a secession.
While some may wish for a military based solution to stop a legal decoupling... there simply does not seem to be a plausible route for any military solution by any party. Russia made it ~100km into Ukraine before being stopped, it's 2900 KM between Houston and Boston - all means of ending such a stalemate would escalate to MAD as the military remains spread across states for political and defense purposes. Even in the civil war, the North was unable to enforce integration of the south through reconstruction.
That's an interesting Taiwan-ish model for succession. It probably has a better chance of success than the kind of outright succession the Confederacy tried, because it could be conducted slowly while still paying lip service to the Union. At each small step, military intervention might seem like too extreme of an escalation.
Though it still would be difficult. At some point it would require the state citizens to start breaking federal laws in very obvious ways (e.g. stop paying federal taxes), but I doubt they'd be fine with not crossing state lines in that case. Also a lot of the money in state budgets pass through the federal government, so it would probably be really expensive to replace that without some of the more extreme steps.
This has been tested, and the states—consisting of a very large share of the states up to that moment in the union—testing it ultimately failed.
The federal-state balance of the relative capacities to apply force has not, in the interim, shifted in favor of the states in any way I can ascertain, in fact, those capacities have been significantly centralized in the Federal government since the last time it was tried in a large scale way, or even since the more recent, smaller scale attempts.
> We already see this with legal marijuana, there are multiple campaigns aimed to form interstate compacts without the consent of congress.
Source? There has been lots of talk of an interstate compact with Congressional approval as an alternative vehicle, and transitional stepping stone, to general federal legalization, but I’ve seen nothing about a renegade compact.
State marijuana legalization leans on non-commandeering doctrine rather than nullification.
When do states send tax dollars to the federal government? Individuals send tax dollars to the federal government, but states mostly receive federal money.
You would need consent from the rest of the states in order to leave, and that isn't happening any time soon.
I don’t think the hard part is getting people on board with it. The hard part is just getting a vote on it.
EDIT to address your point: I think if enough people want it, it will happen. The Civil War was about slavery, no matter what some folks will say. The current direction isn’t towards war, it’s towards an indifference followed by dissolution. There’s no energy to keep Florida or Texas or California from leaving if that’s what a large majority want.
If they raised this sort of thing to a vote, I would strongly hope that we let them build their own Republican utopia.
They'll never raise this to a vote, though, because the last thing they want is for that wish to be granted. Complaining about the federal government when you've mismanaged your state is easy, actually having to manage it without relying on handouts is not.
Ukraine gave Russia the nukes it held within its border. Looking back probably not a great idea.
We're talking about a military coup in the United States, which is a big topic, but technically, very few tanks and bombs or jets or nukes are in states. In part, for this reason. They're on federal property. States have militias; the U.S. has aircraft carriers and cruise missiles. If a secessionist government tried to invade federal territory, I would be wholly in favor of a decisive (if compassionate) military response.
The bigger challenge, as it always is, is the people.
Anyone can declare anything. What matters is who the troops and missile launchers listen to. That’s the Pentagon.
Would soldiers who live in these states obey DC's order to kill their neighbors and friends?
They certainly might, depending on the circumstances. But it is unclear to me that the outcome would be simple.
This is a popular factoid, but it often leaves out the fact that Russia had the codes to use the nukes, the ability to maintain them, and that other countries (like the US) wanted the nukes out of Ukraine.
If they had kept them, it is far from clear that they would be a nuclear power today.
As someone who lives in California, I thought you were talking about us. I wish I could move to Florida. Seems like a better place to live in almost all regards.
Unless of course, Florida's hurricanes, mosquitos, sinking land, horrible people, and lackluster economy are keeping you from moving there?
OTOH, Florida begs for federal handouts every time there's a big storm because somehow they never get around to requiring developers to build flood-resistant structures.
When someone calls an entire population of a state, nation, or region as "horrible people"; we call them bigots. It is time for introspection and reflection when you get to a point where everyone you don't agree with are horrible people. And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
Usually this would be flagged, but it goes with the party lines I suppose so it is allowed.
And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
That is objectively false. Only the Miami-Dade metropolitan area in Florida leans blue.
The funniest thing of all is talking about generalizing all people when talking about a state that passed laws to demonize all lgbtqia people.
Eastern Washington and Oregon have been talking about seceding from their respective states for /years/ and absolutely nothing has come of it because—surprise—most people don’t want to leave.
The number of people who are intensely political (who dislike Florida because politics or who are “Let’s go, Brandon!”) are a very small part of the population. They’re just very loud.
I think this is actually at the root of why America's administrative capacity has become so weak. Administrators are, for want of a better phrase, not content to stay in their lane, and try to smuggle other ideological baggage through their administration, which breeds resentment and resistance. Transportation planners are not content to build the roads people want, but want to make people take trains instead. Educators and public health experts think it's their job to weigh on race relations. The administrative class has always been haughty, since its inception in the Wilson era, but now they've found religion and become evangelical about it.
No particular state is more hell-bent on keeping Texas in the union than Texas.
All of the Texan talk of secession is just virtue signaling and pea-cocking, intended to drive the voter base to show up to the polls.
Most states that appear to lean in either direction at the governmental level have very substantial opposition voter populations. This is the biggest reason nobody is seriously going to consider secession, aside of rhetoric for the base.
I'm not sure what happens in the case of an abortion provider from a legal state visiting an illegal state. My suspicion is that they might try and be rebuked on jurisdictional grounds. It's an even weaker case than local citizen travel, since no part of the acts occurred inside the jurisdiction.
Impressive gymnastics.
I don't know what hair you're trying to split here, but the gymnastics are getting even more imporessive.
> Regulating one’s own citizens while they are traveling elsewhere is different than trying to regulate a different state.
Missouri's law, for example, would allow Missouri citizens to sue out-of-state physicians who perform an abortion on a Missourian but have never lived, set foot in, or done business in Missouri.
Looking forward to the incoming sequence of twists and flips.
This topic generates strong feelings for obvious and legitimate reasons. But that makes it more important (not less) to follow the site guidelines. That's why we added this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I guess my county (Anne Arundel, MD) is technically "blue" at the moment--it went for Biden +14. But in 2018's "blue wave" it went for Larry Hogan +38. Maryland, despite being solidly Democrat, is pretty conservative in a distinctly mid-Atlantic way.
While we have disagreements, the American people are not particularly divided on the major issues.
Another factoid: Biden got 5,244,886 votes in New York and 5,259,126 votes in Texas. In other words, more people voted for Biden in Texas than in New York.
That changed recently when the state became the target of national politics. Suddenly, the folks on the other side of the aisle were not Georgia Democrats, but California and New York Democrats. That created a ton of polarization that didn’t exist before.
Right now, our national politics pits California and New York Democrats against Mississippi Republicans, and the rest of us just have to pick a side. Things would be far less polarized if we split up, and it was California Democrats versus California Republicans and Texas Democrats versus Texas Republicans.
Here in Maryland, we have an extremely popular Republican governor that does Republican stuff like oppose public transit and try to keep taxes low. State politics is quite civil, because Baltimore isn’t San Francisco (despite voting similarly for Biden) but neither is Carroll County Mississippi (despite voting similarly for Trump).
Also, if you're using New York and California Democrats as a proxy for left-wing voters, Biden is pretty disappointing on that front. A huge part of why Biden was the nominee was specifically so he could appeal to centrist voters. The fact that Texan and Georgian voters voted for someone who was picked partly to appeal to those same people should not be surprising.
No, I’m making a completely different argument. The point is that Georgia Democrats are closer to Georgia Republicans than California Democrats are to Georgia Republicans. When politics is locally focused, there is less acrimony because the sides are less far apart.
But when Georgia politics came under the national spotlight, it became a proxy for the fight between New York and California Democrats and Mississippi Republicans. “Democrat” in Georgia used to mean Zell Miller, but now refers to Nancy Pelosi. That greatly increased the acrimony of politics in the state.
Your point about Biden actually supports my point. Before southern Democrats rescued his campaign, the Act Blue donors and activists were running a carnival where candidates were all raising their hand to open borders. Trump didn’t run against Biden, he ran against those people. That’s only possible because New York and California Democrats have so much power over the party apparatus and messaging that it’s easy to make them the face of the party.
If the states were split up, that wouldn’t happen. My county exec is a Democrat, but it’s hard for me to get worked up about him because he’s a farmer. If folks in New York and California had no input into the laws that applied to me, or how my schools are run, etc., I don’t think I would follow politics at all.
I'm struggling to understand how we go from that, to saying that there is even the remotest support in Georgia to secede even though every national candidate Georgians elected is in the party currently in power, or that after secession the elections would or should go back to Republican vs. Republican-lite. The only way any of that makes sense is if the actual goal is to separate the Georgia Democrats from the national apparatus to hopefully give state Republicans a chance to figuratively beat the newly-activated voters into submission. In fact if we're going strictly by the numbers then in any split Georgia should stay with the Democratic parts of the country.
Also I'm not sure what Pelosi has to do with any of this but at the moment, from the outside, the face of Georgia Democrats look like Ossoff, Warnock and Abrams all of whom are authentically local. I'm sure Trump and the Republican party would like people to think that Pelosi is the face of the Georgia Democrats, though.
I do feel bad for Georgian voters, not to mention the people counting the votes. It wasn't their fault that the balance of power came down to them in the end and I'm sure most of them didn't like being in the middle of that firestorm. However I suspect any acrimony was primarily due to the fact that the Democrats found a winning strategy in a formerly safe state.
They aren't. It's not 1860, no one is campaigning on preserving the Union over other policy considerations. While there would be intense disputes about how to treat people who didn't want to be separated from the US, and about disposition of federal property in the event of a divorce, few in NY or CA outside of the Republican minority in each state would expend even the slightest effort on keeping Texas in the Union as such, though they might oppose bad divorce terms on those other issues.
On the other hand, all the other Republican-led states would oppose the idea fiercely, because it would be a giant shift away from the Republican Party in the national balance of political power. (And, yes, Texas is far from solid red by population, but that's not what matters.)
Then why do they care so much about abortion laws in Texas, or whether Texas expands Medicaid, etc? Really, why do they care about the federal government at all?
Historically, Democrats cared about the federal government because Republicans states like California had the money and they needed the federal government to redistribute it. But today, Democrat states have the money. So what’s the point? Why not just adopt universal healthcare in California without regard to what Texas does?
Because Texas is in the Union, and what is Constitutionally allowed in Texas is what is Constitutionally allowed in their state, and they don't assume that they will have a permanent legislative majority there, because, well, history shows that they likely won't.
Other than that Californians care about rights in Texas the same.way they care about rights in Saudi Arabia.
I think it’s more like the Crusades. Californians believe in the universalism of their moral world view and want to impose it on the heathens in Texas. More like George Bush trying to bring democracy to the Middle East.
That's like saying you need permission to break the law.
Deep down, we all know that if you want to do a thing, you can just do it, and leave those who value systems and processes and order to grapple with it. Trump proved that.
Edit: to be clear, I do not support or like this reality. But if you don't think that the right will do anything other than "lol u mad libs? deal with it" then you haven't been paying attention.
And not even that. Similar agreements and compromises on shared standards, data transfer, compliance etc still have to be made to enable trade. Brexit voters were promised a "bonfire of regulations" yet red tape has doubled to continue trade with the EU and the trade deals the UK has signed with Japan and others are literal copy/paste of EU ones.
US has anti-Federalists, though who can work to legally diminish the power of the central government.
If you look to the Civil war, fighting wasn't kicked off by the declaration of separation, the flashpoint was possession of federal armories in southern states.
I agree it is largely fantasy. The federal gov would never hand over bases in Texas, ect.
It is strange that the US is one of the only countries in the world to tax citizens abroad.
What if you personally object to the secession - would the US allow you to retain your citizenship and "immigrate" to Georgia?
And, what if Florida refused to recognize a class of residents as new citizens? What would happen to all the federal prisoners located in Florida when secession happened - Florida probably doesn't want to adopt a large population of incarcerated Americans, they'd probably try to give them back to America somehow - ditto for incarcerated Floridians being held outside the state - though Florida might not want them back anyways.
I think, at EOD, the US would probably offer continued US citizenship to any Florida residents who refused to accept Florida citizenship - which would likely result in Florida being a majority expat country, since, would you rather throw your personal future in with some new secessionist government or an established government that might end up eating Florida in a few weeks anyways?
And other portions of their economy are dependent on being a port (both land and sea) for goods entering and leaving the US, much of which would be redirected to other areas unless US purchasers decide to pay extra costs to import through Texas (unlikely).
A more viable attempt at secession might look like: perhaps a new Hawaiian independence party forms with massive (>80%) and sustained (>20 years) on-the-ground support, with all federal representatives coming from this party. Eventually this party might convince the federal and enough state governments to support a constitutional amendment recognizing a specific independence referendum. That's very theoretical but I hope illustrates what actual secession might look like.
Also consider that before the U.S. civil war the southern states voted against Lincoln, the northern candidate, in fact he was not even on the ballot in many of them. If the enslaved people in those states had been able to vote things would have gone differently. So we have a unique and terrible history of states seceding based on a minority's wishes.
The mechanisms to enable secession from the union are either constitutional amendment or military might.
It's a scam. Right-wing governments like the Conservatives are run by and for junkies, who will steal anything not nailed down to sell off cheap for a quick fix of cash.