Voyagers, as to the education systems in “blue” states and the decline of “gifted” programs, I can relate. I was in a “gifted program” that no longer exists.
This is an absolute travesty and reflects the bonkers logic of “equity”
I suspect this goes back to entropy, it’s easier to tear something down than it is to build something up.
The goal of “equity,” in theory, is to uplift those who have fallen behind. An idealistic goal to be sure. In reality, however, the easier path is to hold those who are ahead down.
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that children should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a vain effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No you can’t camp in this city. No you can’t shit in our streets. No you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bond to rob and murder again.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
I also live in downstate illinois under GOP governments. Nearly set a murder per capita record this year (still time I suppose), we occasionally have a D mayor and things run much better than they do now. The gop mayor has done nothing of substance in 2 years and has shown blinding incompetence in more than one area.
i live in upstate ny. the horrible corrupt albany government totally controls the whole state. it doesn’t matter what the local government is. everything is dictated in albany, local government has no say. democrats have ruined NY. and nyc is a shithole, just like chicago.
My dad was from Johnston City near Marion. We watched the last two eclipses there. It’s good to hear about some Democratic success stories. The mayor of Chicago is a disaster.
Technically I’m in central illinois (Springfield area), but almost everyone considers us ‘downstate’….I’ve seen the litany of mediocre governors run through here. The last good GOP one was Jim Edgar in the early 90’s.
And yet you still voted for her🤡. Dems ran the most ridiculously bad campaign in the history of humanity? With the worst possible candidate. Why? Because the people that really run this country, who control both sides of the false dichotomy, wanted chrump. The preferred deep state candidate. And the dems did as instructed, tanked it. Stop being so loyal to these people. They don’t care about you or anyone.
Such a well reasoned article. I like your discussion at the end about NIMBYism. I had never thought of it that way, but if I’m being honest that’s definitely my own feelings towards growth too close to my own home. Though I do live in CO and we have plenty of our own problems. I’ve like Polis, but he can allow local governments to be the ones to take things too far without much pushback from his office.
The best thing California could do to improve governance is repeal CEQA. NEPA already exists, we don't need to have our own environmental impact studies layered on top of the national environmental impact studies.
I'd also say we need some limits on what can and can't be put in an initiative. So much of bad California governance comes from badly-written and overly constraining initiatives. You'd be amazed how many taxes are both required by law and earmarked for something hyper-specific due to initiatives. Everyone knows about Prop 13, which ruined our school funding, but there are so many others that have stacked up over the years.
Yeah, more stringent requirements for how they're written would be great too. I always have to read Vote411 extensively for at least 1 or 2 initiatives just to figure out what the actual effects will be.
1) part of the issue is that the blue states positives are basically unrelated to their governance. They have huge demographic and institutional advantages due to history and often past Republican governance.
2) the sunbelt traditionally has lots of blacks, not the best whites, lost the civil war, and was more or less uninhabitable until air conditioning was invented.
3) in the sunbelt whites vote 2/3rd GOP, as a result they have managed to absorb lots of Hispanics without becoming a one party dem state. In addition that strong right wing culture among the whites does more to assimilate the Hispanics to be more right wing.
In blue states the white electorate was close to 50/50 or only slightly conservative and so once you got a lot of Hispanics it became a one party state where no matter how bad they govern they can still turn out enough Hispanics in exchange for welfare payments.
4) I don’t know if this can be changed and I wouldn’t bet on it personally. I’m moving to a red state and tell everyone the same.
“Wanting to win” in the context of a one party state means winning the Dem primary. So the median voter is the median Dem primary voter, not the true median voter. And of course institutional power is to the left of that.
I of course wish you good luck. But I have lived in polities where bad leads to bad leads to more bad with no self correction. You don’t want to be the last person to exit that situation.
Illinois has had balanced budgets for the first time in 30 years, has some of the most affordable cities in which to live and is hardly is ‘bleeding voters’. Illinois lost 30,000 citizens from 2022 to 2023, mostly because they died.
Nothing is perfect, but under our last GOP governor we didn’t even have a budget for 3 of 6 years, the guy was grossly incompetent, but less so than the ‘look at my wall’ president.
Illinois has had budget deficits every year since 2002. From 2003 to 2015 and from 2019 to current it had a democratic governor. There was a brief four year interlude with a Republican governor.
Throughout that entire time, and probably before if I kept clicking backwards in Wikipedia, the state legislator had a firm and perhaps even overwhelming Democratic majority.
So I think it's fair to call Illinois a one part Democratic state. Perhaps they occasionally elect a Mitt Romney or Larry Hogan for governor, but the levers of power are all the the Democrats hands.
I'm glad that Illinois was able to, like every other state that did it better during the same time, take the spigot of deficit spending Fedbucks that got passed around the last four years to stem its bleeding a little. You will note that compared to other states at the same time it still tanks terrible.
Illinois, like a lot of blue states, is one giant pension accounting scam for their public sector unions. In a Blue States its citizens exist for no other purpose than to give ridiculous pensions and benefits to self congratulatory Eds and Meds parasites who control the entire state through machine politics.
If I were to break it down further, Chicago ranks badly in affordability (outside of all the areas where you will get shot) and is a totally dysfunctional city living on the fumes of what it once was and the rest of the state ranks better because nobody wants to live in these declining rust belt nowheresville that exist south of Chicago.
I live in southern Maine ( inland not coastal) in the small town I lived with my mom. My sister has a house a mile and a half away ( mom’s old house) .
Over the bridge in somersworth nh the homeless situation is so bad. My son’s girlfriend used to work for servepro and part of the job was cleaning out the camps. They stay closer to the stores . Behind Home Depot ( near Walmart and market basket) .
Our downtown is building on the 5 acre site where the tanning factory used to be when I lived her as a child. They are mostly 1&2 bedrooms. Nothing included ( even water and sewer where the water isn’t drinkable most of the summer. ) $2k a month. 900 sq feet, no additional storage or assigned parking. While this project will bring 150 or so apartments, I can’t think of who can afford them. Electric rates are some of the highest in the country. Add all these bills and your 900 sq foot apartment will just be a cage you sleep in while working to afford it.
I guess I’m saying not only big cities are dealing with homeless people. It’s very sad. The cost of living here has skyrocketed. It gets cold obviously. So many people with pets and kids.
I’m all for affordable housing. The city of Dover Nh has made a mini house village. For lower income people. It seems successful so far. My son works at ups and delivers there. There has to be a more humane way to approach this problem.
Many good points here, but I think people overestimate the impact of government/taxes/etc. on why people move between states.
If you look at state migration patterns, there’s clearly a broad trend of people moving out of cold/ugly states (Illinois, Ohio, New York, etc.) to states that are warm/beautiful (Florida, Texas, Utah, Washington).
This is not true for California, which is losing population despite being warm and beautiful. It has absurdly high home prices, implying that there is high demand, but simply not enough construction, which is a clear policy failure.
Texas and Florida have been misgoverned as well, mostly by Republicans, for the opposite reason—blind neglect of the welfare of state residents, a core function of government at every level.
Look no further than Texas’ refusal to winterize its electric grid and Florida’s home insurance & building code crises. Neither state has taken the ACA expansion of Medicaid, even though it would make their residents healthier and more productive.
Meanwhile, when violent crime rates are taken into account, Miami and Houston are far more dangerous cities than NYC and Los Angeles. And those “little blue dots” on the US election map? They account for nearly 70% of the economic output of this country.
I disagree with Nimbyism being a desire to avoid disorder or being about crime fears. Nimbyism is always and everywhere a desire to avoid the uncomfortable impacts of change, most of which have nothing to do with crime. They’re usually about a generalized fear of change and a desire for control. Nimbyism happens as much in wealthy communities adding new wealthy amenities as it does in poorer communities. The simple reason that red states have less impacts from Nimbyism is that they have more permissive building laws that provide fewer avenues for citizens to object. It’s not that they have fewer NIMBY’s. It’s just that NIMBY’s are disempowered. The problem for blue states is their inherent desire for participatory democracy has been turned into a tool to block progress itself. That’s what started happening in the 1970s. A lot of people looked at the recent past and decided that the problem had been modern progress itself. We had “paved paradise.” A show like “This Old House,” which I think has been popular across the political spectrum, was emblematic of the idea of holding on to beautiful old things instead of tearing them down. That’s been a powerful ethos in the second half of the 20th century. It just ran into a demographic boom from millennial household formation, which is why we’ve seen the past 10 years play out this way. We underbuilt housing and we simply have to fix that.
I grew up in Atherton and now live in Maryland and drive all around the DMV for work, Virginian roads fucking suck I don’t know where you got that example from lol
Why are you judging states’ education systems on the basis of fourth grade math scores? What about other grades and subjects? I agree that that matters but that evidence is too narrow in scope to serve as evidence for your claims.
I'd rather live in Chicago or California than Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina. If that's what "red" governance looks like, you can keep those results to yourself.
“ California spends relatively more on social services like welfare and relatively less on infrastructure.”
I wonder how much tax payer money is spent on transgender medical expenses, in blue states.
Hormone replacement therapy, including pharmaceuticals, doctor’s visits, bloodwork, and every form of “gender affirming” surgery covered on public health insurance…
Many 20 year olds bum their way from the Midwest to cities on the WC, just to transition on public health insurance.
Voyagers, as to the education systems in “blue” states and the decline of “gifted” programs, I can relate. I was in a “gifted program” that no longer exists.
This is an absolute travesty and reflects the bonkers logic of “equity”
I suspect this goes back to entropy, it’s easier to tear something down than it is to build something up.
The goal of “equity,” in theory, is to uplift those who have fallen behind. An idealistic goal to be sure. In reality, however, the easier path is to hold those who are ahead down.
Equity breeds laziness and entitlement mentality. Equal opportunities is where we find success, we have to work hard and be focused.
My take:
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that children should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a vain effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No you can’t camp in this city. No you can’t shit in our streets. No you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bond to rob and murder again.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
XXX
I also live in downstate illinois under GOP governments. Nearly set a murder per capita record this year (still time I suppose), we occasionally have a D mayor and things run much better than they do now. The gop mayor has done nothing of substance in 2 years and has shown blinding incompetence in more than one area.
i live in upstate ny. the horrible corrupt albany government totally controls the whole state. it doesn’t matter what the local government is. everything is dictated in albany, local government has no say. democrats have ruined NY. and nyc is a shithole, just like chicago.
My dad was from Johnston City near Marion. We watched the last two eclipses there. It’s good to hear about some Democratic success stories. The mayor of Chicago is a disaster.
You aren’t wrong about Chicago’s Mayor.
R Emmanuel was quite good, since then 😳.
Technically I’m in central illinois (Springfield area), but almost everyone considers us ‘downstate’….I’ve seen the litany of mediocre governors run through here. The last good GOP one was Jim Edgar in the early 90’s.
I agree with much of what you said, but murderers are not released without bail. It just doesn’t happen.
Chris: Good point. I should have dropped the again.
And yet you still voted for her🤡. Dems ran the most ridiculously bad campaign in the history of humanity? With the worst possible candidate. Why? Because the people that really run this country, who control both sides of the false dichotomy, wanted chrump. The preferred deep state candidate. And the dems did as instructed, tanked it. Stop being so loyal to these people. They don’t care about you or anyone.
Because trump is about the last person I’d want to be president. He’s literally a security threat to the nation.
I didn’t vote for either of them. I voted to increase my real estate tax rate to obtain more land for our local forest preserve district.
hopefully they use it to actually do that
Such a well reasoned article. I like your discussion at the end about NIMBYism. I had never thought of it that way, but if I’m being honest that’s definitely my own feelings towards growth too close to my own home. Though I do live in CO and we have plenty of our own problems. I’ve like Polis, but he can allow local governments to be the ones to take things too far without much pushback from his office.
Thanks! Yeah it’s a huge problem since it’s sensitive so people come up with elaborate other excuses for why it’s a bad idea.
“Oh the building will cast shade on a tree. We can’t do that”
The best thing California could do to improve governance is repeal CEQA. NEPA already exists, we don't need to have our own environmental impact studies layered on top of the national environmental impact studies.
I'd also say we need some limits on what can and can't be put in an initiative. So much of bad California governance comes from badly-written and overly constraining initiatives. You'd be amazed how many taxes are both required by law and earmarked for something hyper-specific due to initiatives. Everyone knows about Prop 13, which ruined our school funding, but there are so many others that have stacked up over the years.
Yeah voter propositions are something I feel conflicted about. I could see putting limits on specific taxes or regulations being good.
Yeah, more stringent requirements for how they're written would be great too. I always have to read Vote411 extensively for at least 1 or 2 initiatives just to figure out what the actual effects will be.
1) part of the issue is that the blue states positives are basically unrelated to their governance. They have huge demographic and institutional advantages due to history and often past Republican governance.
2) the sunbelt traditionally has lots of blacks, not the best whites, lost the civil war, and was more or less uninhabitable until air conditioning was invented.
3) in the sunbelt whites vote 2/3rd GOP, as a result they have managed to absorb lots of Hispanics without becoming a one party dem state. In addition that strong right wing culture among the whites does more to assimilate the Hispanics to be more right wing.
In blue states the white electorate was close to 50/50 or only slightly conservative and so once you got a lot of Hispanics it became a one party state where no matter how bad they govern they can still turn out enough Hispanics in exchange for welfare payments.
4) I don’t know if this can be changed and I wouldn’t bet on it personally. I’m moving to a red state and tell everyone the same.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I'm less doomer than you are on this. Democrats want to win and I'm, cautiously, optimistic they will improve governance.
“Wanting to win” in the context of a one party state means winning the Dem primary. So the median voter is the median Dem primary voter, not the true median voter. And of course institutional power is to the left of that.
I of course wish you good luck. But I have lived in polities where bad leads to bad leads to more bad with no self correction. You don’t want to be the last person to exit that situation.
Illinois has had balanced budgets for the first time in 30 years, has some of the most affordable cities in which to live and is hardly is ‘bleeding voters’. Illinois lost 30,000 citizens from 2022 to 2023, mostly because they died.
Nothing is perfect, but under our last GOP governor we didn’t even have a budget for 3 of 6 years, the guy was grossly incompetent, but less so than the ‘look at my wall’ president.
Illinois has had budget deficits every year since 2002. From 2003 to 2015 and from 2019 to current it had a democratic governor. There was a brief four year interlude with a Republican governor.
Throughout that entire time, and probably before if I kept clicking backwards in Wikipedia, the state legislator had a firm and perhaps even overwhelming Democratic majority.
So I think it's fair to call Illinois a one part Democratic state. Perhaps they occasionally elect a Mitt Romney or Larry Hogan for governor, but the levers of power are all the the Democrats hands.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2024/09/03/number-of-states-with-annual-deficits-hit-record-low-in-fiscal-year-2022#
I'm glad that Illinois was able to, like every other state that did it better during the same time, take the spigot of deficit spending Fedbucks that got passed around the last four years to stem its bleeding a little. You will note that compared to other states at the same time it still tanks terrible.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/fiscal-stability
Illinois ranks dead last in fiscal health. Pick another ranking and I guarantee they are in the bottom 10.
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/financial-state-of-the-states-2023.pdf
Illinois, like a lot of blue states, is one giant pension accounting scam for their public sector unions. In a Blue States its citizens exist for no other purpose than to give ridiculous pensions and benefits to self congratulatory Eds and Meds parasites who control the entire state through machine politics.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/affordability
Illinois ranks 35th in affordability.
If I were to break it down further, Chicago ranks badly in affordability (outside of all the areas where you will get shot) and is a totally dysfunctional city living on the fumes of what it once was and the rest of the state ranks better because nobody wants to live in these declining rust belt nowheresville that exist south of Chicago.
I live in southern Maine ( inland not coastal) in the small town I lived with my mom. My sister has a house a mile and a half away ( mom’s old house) .
Over the bridge in somersworth nh the homeless situation is so bad. My son’s girlfriend used to work for servepro and part of the job was cleaning out the camps. They stay closer to the stores . Behind Home Depot ( near Walmart and market basket) .
Our downtown is building on the 5 acre site where the tanning factory used to be when I lived her as a child. They are mostly 1&2 bedrooms. Nothing included ( even water and sewer where the water isn’t drinkable most of the summer. ) $2k a month. 900 sq feet, no additional storage or assigned parking. While this project will bring 150 or so apartments, I can’t think of who can afford them. Electric rates are some of the highest in the country. Add all these bills and your 900 sq foot apartment will just be a cage you sleep in while working to afford it.
I guess I’m saying not only big cities are dealing with homeless people. It’s very sad. The cost of living here has skyrocketed. It gets cold obviously. So many people with pets and kids.
I’m all for affordable housing. The city of Dover Nh has made a mini house village. For lower income people. It seems successful so far. My son works at ups and delivers there. There has to be a more humane way to approach this problem.
The Bay Ares still is the most interesting and dynamic area in the world. We just need to build more housing to get the rents down.
100%
1. Infrastructure
2. Water Storage (reservoirs etc.)
3. Enforcement of existing laws.
My top 3 for California.. such a beautiful state. Unmatched in my opinion, but struggling to maintain the luster.
Many good points here, but I think people overestimate the impact of government/taxes/etc. on why people move between states.
If you look at state migration patterns, there’s clearly a broad trend of people moving out of cold/ugly states (Illinois, Ohio, New York, etc.) to states that are warm/beautiful (Florida, Texas, Utah, Washington).
This is not true for California, which is losing population despite being warm and beautiful. It has absurdly high home prices, implying that there is high demand, but simply not enough construction, which is a clear policy failure.
Thanks for sharing and reading!
Texas and Florida have been misgoverned as well, mostly by Republicans, for the opposite reason—blind neglect of the welfare of state residents, a core function of government at every level.
Look no further than Texas’ refusal to winterize its electric grid and Florida’s home insurance & building code crises. Neither state has taken the ACA expansion of Medicaid, even though it would make their residents healthier and more productive.
Meanwhile, when violent crime rates are taken into account, Miami and Houston are far more dangerous cities than NYC and Los Angeles. And those “little blue dots” on the US election map? They account for nearly 70% of the economic output of this country.
Where does the stat cone from that Miami and Houstan are far more dangerous?
And how did you get to 70% of output?
FBI
I disagree with Nimbyism being a desire to avoid disorder or being about crime fears. Nimbyism is always and everywhere a desire to avoid the uncomfortable impacts of change, most of which have nothing to do with crime. They’re usually about a generalized fear of change and a desire for control. Nimbyism happens as much in wealthy communities adding new wealthy amenities as it does in poorer communities. The simple reason that red states have less impacts from Nimbyism is that they have more permissive building laws that provide fewer avenues for citizens to object. It’s not that they have fewer NIMBY’s. It’s just that NIMBY’s are disempowered. The problem for blue states is their inherent desire for participatory democracy has been turned into a tool to block progress itself. That’s what started happening in the 1970s. A lot of people looked at the recent past and decided that the problem had been modern progress itself. We had “paved paradise.” A show like “This Old House,” which I think has been popular across the political spectrum, was emblematic of the idea of holding on to beautiful old things instead of tearing them down. That’s been a powerful ethos in the second half of the 20th century. It just ran into a demographic boom from millennial household formation, which is why we’ve seen the past 10 years play out this way. We underbuilt housing and we simply have to fix that.
I grew up in Atherton and now live in Maryland and drive all around the DMV for work, Virginian roads fucking suck I don’t know where you got that example from lol
Why are you judging states’ education systems on the basis of fourth grade math scores? What about other grades and subjects? I agree that that matters but that evidence is too narrow in scope to serve as evidence for your claims.
I'd rather live in Chicago or California than Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina. If that's what "red" governance looks like, you can keep those results to yourself.
“ California spends relatively more on social services like welfare and relatively less on infrastructure.”
I wonder how much tax payer money is spent on transgender medical expenses, in blue states.
Hormone replacement therapy, including pharmaceuticals, doctor’s visits, bloodwork, and every form of “gender affirming” surgery covered on public health insurance…
Many 20 year olds bum their way from the Midwest to cities on the WC, just to transition on public health insurance.
Staying in my blue state - love it here