My favorite piece of the recent New York Time article about the negative impact of fading federal aid is the paragraph listing the four states which receive the most: Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Ohio.
These Tea Party strongholds are full of people railing against the sins of Big Government, but facing a litany of economic ills which are largely due to the private sector and lax government regulation.
Florida and Arizona have been hit very hard by the housing crisis, which resulted from housing and banking industry excesses. Michigan and Ohio have been hit very hard by the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing jobs, which is partly a product of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s great lobbying team and the tax loopholes it helped create.
Florida is full of elderly residents draining the federal Treasury via Social Security and Medicare. These hypocrites think nothing of paying for unnecessary procedures like $150 to have their toenails cut in a podiatrist’s office. God forbid they should ever do anything to make the world a better place themsleves or match their own actions with their verbal nonsense.
In sum, these states and their residents are the epitome of big government.
The first step to being an educated voter is understanding your own interests and how to support them. That’s not happening in these states.
They’re like the person who refuses to take sugar with their coffee, after gorging on porterhouse steak and German chocloate cake, because they’re on a diet.
That’s not a diet. That’s denial.
