One more point on healthcare reform: yes, there are a lot of people who don’t have healthcare insurance, roughly 46 million. That includes non-citizens both legal and non-legal. In the Northeast and Midwest about 11% of the population is uninsured; in the South and the West about 18% of the population is uninsured. The regional character of the problem is obvious.
If we treat it as a national problem that means we’ll be subsidizing the South and the West at the expense of the Northeast and the Midwest. And people wonder why the populations in the South and West are growing while the populations of the Northeast and Midwest are staying the same or shrinking. If you reward something, in this case increased populations in the South and West, you’ll get more of it.
Populations aren’t growing in the South and West because of some governmental program. Populations are growing there because air conditioning is cheap, and the North and Midwest are practically Canada when winter roles around. Fort Myers, Florida is a helluva lot easier to bear come January than Cleveland, Ohio or Buffalo, New York. And all the new construction needed for the populations shifting South and West draws workers from South of the Border – the poor yearning to be employed.
I don’t think that subsidies are the only reason but I think they’re one of the reasons, Icepick. We’ve been subsidizing the South in particular very heavily for 70 years. It’s having some effect.
Other reasons include climate (which you’ve mentioned), cheap land, low rate of unionization, better business climate.
But don’t rule out the subsidies. You can draw a straight line from government spending through practically every major company in the South and West.
You know, the “We do it better up North” arguement is as tired in print as it is in person.
(It’s not the first time you’ve made this kind of argument, either. You’ve written about Chicago’s energy infrastructure and it’s superiority over that of the South and West. You seem particularly proud of the amount of electricity derived from nuclear power. Well, guess what, we can’t build any nuclear power plants down here to cover our needs because all of you wonderful Northeasterners and Midwesterners imposed a defacto ban on building nuclear power plants in 1979. You have been quite arrogant in stating that we should get stuffed down here since we didn’t plan things out as well as you did in Chicago. Well guess what, Dave? You guys have had very little population growth in Chicago in 30 years time, while populations down here have exploded. Double your population in 30 years time and you will find that your current energy system that you are so proud of will fall apart without new coal or nuclear plants. But we’re not allowed to build nuclear plants. Improvements in efficient production can easily handle overall per cap increases IF you don’t add too many extra caps. But here in Florida our population has doubled in the last 30 years, and projections show it will double again in the next 40 years.)
(To put this in terms more easily understood, using the growth rates of the last 28 years, the Chicago Metropolitan area will take over 99 years to double in population. Using the same type of criteria, it will take Florida just under 31 years to double in size. Which is good, because in 100 years the state will be under water. (Thank God for Global Warming.) Your area couldn’t handle growth like that any better than ours did.)
You keep coming back to the subsidies. The government has gotten HUGE in the last 70 years (let’s not forget that was at the insistence of the North Eastern elites), and it has to spend it’s money somewhere. Do you really think it would have made any sense to put the Skunk Works in Manhattan instead of the California dessert? Or perhaps the Loop could have been used as a test firing range and they could have put it in Chicago?
A great many of the subsidies have come South or West expressly because the businesses moved South or West. And they did that because the land was cheap, the climate was good (at least after air conditioning made the summers tolerable for Canadians & the like), and the business environment was favorable. You can subsidize the upper Midwest all you want (and one of your marvelous Chicago pols is doing that now) and it won’t help a damned bit. Get back to me in 10 years and see if all of the money Obama is pouring into Detroit does anything at all to cause the population in Michigan to grow like it has down here or out West. There’s no chance, and you know it. (For that matter, is the population of Mass. going up now that they have “universal” healthcare? I doubt that trend will blip upward. And have about 100 years of farm subsidies helped the Midwestern farm states keep their populations?)
And let me add that a great deal of the government subsidies we have received here in the South, and in places like Phoenix,AZ, have come from SS and Medicare payments to seniors who have relocated here from the Midwest and the North. I’d be more than willing to send them all back where they came from, along with their government checks.