As my friend Will Ricciardella once put it, “Can anyone name a city that went bankrupt because of low taxes, non-union labor, and a relatively free market?”
Of course not.
Detroit, San Bernardino, Stockton, and Central Falls are all on the list of the cities that have gone bankrupt – and what do they all have in common? Ruled by liberal Democrats, of course. And it’s not just Democrat-run cities that are a fiscal disaster (and let’s not get started on their crime problems), take a look at the fifty states ranked by their fiscal condition below (the size of their budgets, their debt loads, and solvency), and see if you notice a pattern among the highest, and lowest-ranked states.
Seem like it’s Republican states in better fiscal shape? You betcha.
I ran a regression comparing each state’s fiscal condition with its ideological leaning (and no, I did not include Puerto Rico). The results were pretty unambiguous.
States with more conservative residents have stronger fiscal conditions than states with more liberal residents. And the results were quite robust, with an R squared of 0.39 and very high significance level for the coefficient.
H/T: Unbiased America
And when we look at how people vote with their feet, it’s clear what they prefer. On net basis, 1000 people move from blue states to red states every day. As it turns out, when your entire platform consists of wasteful spending and high taxes, causing further problems that will be solved with more wasteful spending funded by even more taxes, people eventually begin to get fed up with it. That’s also reflected in the over 1,000 lost seats Democrats have suffered under Obama’s presidency at the federal and state level.
Where would you rather live?
P.S. For anyone actually curious of the math breakdown….
To explain how the numbers were derived, a state’s ranking on fiscal health (from 1 to 50 with 1 being the best) = 0.6267 multiplied by its ideological ranking (from 1 to 50 with 1 being the most conservative) plus a constant of 9.544.
So to predict a state’s Fiscal Health (or FH), multiply 0.6267 times its Ideological Ranking (or IR) and add 9.544. For example, if the state is the 5th most conservative state, it should be the 13th best in terms of fiscal health (0.6267 times 5, plus 9.544, which equals 12.6775, or 13 when rounding up).
As for the R squared value, an R squared of 0.39 means that 39% of the variation in a state’s fiscal health can be explained by its ideological leaning.
Are you surprised that conservative states are more successful than their liberal counterparts? Share your thoughts below!
