Rational Thinking - It's Not Just For Breakfast Any More

[chris_gerrib]

Yesterday I had some fun with the latest SFWA controversy. Today via Jay Lake I see this article: Welfare State: Washington's Republican counties depend on Western Washington's money. How can they survive the state budget cuts they demand?

The gist of the article is that the deeply-Republican counties of Washington state are heavily-subsidized by the tax dollars flowing from the Democratic cities. This is not unique to Washington state - most rural counties in most states are subsidized by cities. Nor is it unique that these very counties decry "government spending" and "socialism."

How are these two thoughts linked? Rational thinking, or the lack thereof. In SFWA's case, the petitioners claim a First Amendment right to hijack an association's trade journal for purposes not amenable to the majority of members. In Washington state, rural Republicans demand budget cuts that somehow won't hurt them. It's magical thinking, not rational thinking.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

It is one of the amusing things here. Eastern Washington is hysterical when it comes to this stuff. They live, largely at the largess of King County, and by King County I mean Seattle, but they have a really destructive side.

They're working hard to get bus routes and public transport in Seattle shut down because in Ellensburg they don't use our buses, and quietly ignore that they wouldn't be able to live in Ellensburg without us and our buses...

We're seeing the same nonsense in Bellevue where a local landowner has been trying to stop dirty, commie trains from displacing good, American, Republican cars from driving to his shopping centers...

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

It's a common trope among rural and exurban conservatives that the big cities are bleeding them dry with taxes. That's flatly counterfactual, and evidence to the contrary is widely available, but the entire conservative project of the post-Nixon era can be summed up as an effort to absolutely privilege ideological conviction at the expense of evidence-based reality. Hence everything from evolution denial to birtherism. Why should awareness of the tax structure be exempt from carefully fostered wholesale willful ignorance?

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Facts are like gravity - they get everybody eventually.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I've seen the point made that on the current trajectory, blue state America continues to look more and more like Europe and continues to be prosperous and red state American becomes increasingly poor and screwed up, all the while demanding less and less be spent on them.