Red State Moochers and Takers

To listen to the Republican Party and it's increasingly ignorant and delusional base it's us folks in blue state (or in the case of Virginia, occasionally blue states) who are the moochers and takers - the ones who are not "real Americans," if you will.  And not surprisingly, in the wake of last week's stinging defeat of the GOP and a bursting of the bubble that many in the GOP inhabit, now these "real Americans" and "traditional Americans" are having a shit fit and want to prove their patriotism by seceding from America.  These folks are frighteningly too stupid to note the major disconnect between their feigned patriotism and their own actions.  Likewise, they are too stupid to grasp that it is they and their states who are the biggest takers and moochers in the larger view  of things sucking up much mote from the federal government tit than they contribute.  I truly believe that it is coming to the point where to be a Republican it needs to be a requirement that one have "I'm a moron" tattooed on their forehead.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the magnitude of the mooching going on in this would be secessionist states.  Here are excerpts:

[A] large number of patriotic Americans, mostly from states won by Mitt Romney last week, have petitioned the White House to let them secede. They should be careful about what they wish for. 

Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. The balance is the opposite in blue states. The secession petitions, therefore, give the opportunity to create what would be, in a fiscal sense, a far more perfect union.

Among those states with large numbers of petitioners asking out: Louisiana (more than 28,000 signatures at midday Tuesday), which gets about $1.45 in federal largess for every $1 it pays in taxes; Alabama (more than 20,000 signatures), which takes $1.71 for every $1 it puts in; South Carolina (26,000), which takes $1.38 for its dollar; and Missouri (22,000), which takes $1.29 for its dollar.

Since the effort gained attention this week, copycats in all but a few states have joined the petition drive. To be fair, White House officials could refuse the secession petitions of states Obama won, such as New York (which gets only 79 cents on its tax dollar), Michigan (85 cents) and Colorado (79 cents).

What would be left is a Confederacy of Takers, including relatively poor states such as Alaska, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. One of the few would-be Confederacy members that pays more than it receives is Texas, which because of oil money is roughly break-even at 94 cents of benefits for its tax dollar. (The statistics, from an analysis of tax and revenue data by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, were published in 2006, but the broad pattern doesn’t vary much over time.)

Obama could also try to offload onto the Confederacy of the Takers North and South Dakota and Montana ($1.73, $1.49 and $1.58 in benefits, respectively), but this would probably only work if Canada agreed to allow overflight rights for American aircraft to reach the West Coast states of Washington, Oregon and California (88 cents, 97 cents and 79 cents on their tax dollars, respectively).

Possibly, the new United States would need to negotiate certain protectorates in the Confederacy — Austin, New Orleans, South Florida and the like — the way the British did in Hong Kong. Then there is the awkward matter of what the breakaway nation would do to its poor.

[W]ould-be rebels from the red states should keep in mind during the coming budget battle that those who are most ardent about cutting government spending tend to come from parts of the country that most rely on it. 

There once was a time when Republicans cherished education, reason and knowledge.  Those days are clearly gone and the party has instead become a confederacy of dunces.  And leading the charge are the Christofascists who steadfastly cling to a neolithic level of knowledge of the world and other humans.