Have you read Goldy’s piece in the paper this week, on the rural republican welfare queens of Washington State? You should.
Indeed, if Washington is a welfare state, it is residents in these mostly rural, mostly Eastern, mostly Republican counties who are the biggest beneficiaries, while taxpayers here in the blue parts of the state are left footing the bill. And while your typical liberal Seattleite might be neither surprised nor disturbed at this revelation, the degree of the gap between who benefits from state government and who pays for it may come as a bit of a shock.
Goldy goes on to elaborate, with numbers and figures, the sheer extent of this disparity—Liberal King County only receives 62 cents on every dollar sent to the state, rural republican ferry county devours $3.16 for every dollar they send to the state. Goldy lays out the central paradox here: The very voters about to suffer the most from cuts in the State government are voting with fanaticism for these same cuts. He attributes this voting pattern, implicitly, to ignorance on the part of rural voters.
I have an alternative hypothesis. Rural voters vote against the State out of spite; they’d rather see the entire enterprise fail than Seattle succeed.
In the Odyssey of my medical education over the past few years—taking me, among others, to deeply red Southern / rural King County and Alaska—I’ve been slowly recognizing this pattern.
A good chunk of the country, particularly the deep red parts, feels a genuine and deep despair about their role in the new world that is emerging around us. A good many of rural and suburban Washingtonians feel like the world is leaving them behind—with some accuracy in their assessment.
In contrast, Seattleites are relatively well positioned for the globalizing world: Multicultural, multilingual, highly educated and plain old competitive on a global stage in a way that rural America has fought against at every step. Much of this advantage comes from the very programs cut or being cut right now, thanks to the troglodyte voting patterns: King County’s exemplary public health system, a well developed refugee integration program, high quality and low-cost schools from Kindergarden (previously full-day) to graduate school, a world-quality public hospital (Harborview) and cultural institutions.
Put yourself in Ferry County—with all seven thousand or so of your peers. How optimistic would you feel about your future prospects? A glorious future for your offspring in the meth production and consumption industries? Fuck ’em all, you might think. If I’m going down, those liberal assholes in Seattle are going down too.
Mark Ames and I agree on this. In a lovely essay, recently updated, Mark lays out the case for spite with damning precision.
Why do so many working- and middle-class white males vote against what is obviously their own best interests?
I can tell you why. They do so out of spite. Put your ear to the ground in this country, and you’ll hear the toxic spite churning…
Spite-voters also lack the sense that they have a stake in America’s future. That’s another area that separates the spite-bloc’s way of thinking from the progressive-left that wants to help them. There is something proprietary implied in all of the didacticism and concern found in the left’s tone—and they do all have that grating, caring tone, it’s built into the foundations of their whole structure. But consider this: The left struggles to understand why so many non-millionaire Americans vote Republican, and yet they rarely ask themselves why so many millionaires, particularly the most beautiful and privileged millionaires in Manhattan and Los Angeles, vote for the Democrats.
I can answer both. Rich, beautiful, coastal types are liberal precisely because their lives are so wonderful. They want to preserve their lives exactly as they are. If I were a rich movie star, I’d vote for peace and poverty relief. War and domestic insurrection are the greatest threats to their already-perfect lives—why mess with it? This rational fear of the peasantry is frequently misinterpreted as rich guilt, but that’s not the case. They just want to pay off all the have-nots to keep them from storming their manors and impaling them on stakes.
You should read it all.
What was said about bread and circuses? The Romans understood this well.
@54 – Who do you think bought all the timber from the lumber industry in Eastern Washington? It sure as fuck wasn’t people in Okanogan and Ferry counties. That land that you bitch about being “taken” was PUBLIC LAND to begin with.
You’re worse than the locals in the Methow Valley who bitch and moan about salmon recovery programs taking away water rights THAT THEY NEVER HAD.
Soupy You have apparently misunderstood. The land that is being taken iva GMA is private land and reducing our ability to use our land to maintain income but we still get to pay taxes on it.
The other in part is the loss from the sale of timber taxes for the county. This is a state wide law that our counties have lost as a result of “environmentalist stopping local foresters from being able to stay in business as well as forcing the largest mill out of the area and the resulting income being removed from our county. It would be like the Seattle / King County area loosing between 1/3 to ½ the business including Microsoft and Boeing . Are you getting a clue yet or are you still looking at it from some place in Egypt?
I have sold logs to local mills off my private land as well. Do you not understand that I as a landowner can sell things that grow on my land?
When such distorted perspectives are presented it no wonder so many are confused. O thats right now I remember socialist don’t own land they let their land lords /co-op pay the taxes.
@57 I am thinking that I was not clear enough that the county taxes were are incurred from the sale of timber from USFS as well. This subject is diverse enough without bringing the Methow into the subject. Less we Digress. If the subject comes up in a slog and I have time to address it I may. Unlike folks in Seattle I do not delude my self into thinking I have the best information that is available living hundreds of miles away.
Complain about conservative trolls not logging in, suddenly Basehead and Raindrop log in.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
I’m still not convince Basehead believes anything he says.
@58, you can’t sell the things that grow on your land when doing so affects the people around you.
In Mason County, a decade or more ago, a landowner logged everything on his land on a slope. A year later a large storm came through and the slope became a mudslide. The mudslide wiped out the state highway beneath it, a house above it went with it, and several other houses became uninhabitable. The only recourse the homeowners had was to sue the other property owner, who declared bankruptcy. That same story has been repeated across the state.
Unfortunately, land use protections for your neighbors are few and far between and come into play after the damage is done. So spare me your whining about prevented you from logging your property. You don’t say which state laws or regulations prevent you from logging your land, but the reasons why you can’t are usually justifiable looking at past history.
@58 The legal situation you mentioned is not anything new. That legal premise was established in England with the first steam powered locomotives. But this subject is about land and taxes in Eastern Washington. The erosion and such bad logging practices is not nor has not been the case in Eastern Washington on private lands. Private land owners in Eastern Washington in Ferry County particularly are exceptional stewards of the land.
This has been one of the frustrating things about living here, in that the USFS has been a bad steward of the land as Top Down Government genially screws things up even more when they try to control things from hundreds of miles away.
The Loss of the use of the land is not only for logging but most everything else.
The legal aspect that you apparently missed in my past comments is the Growth Management Act ( GMA ) It is a flawed effort to do a good thing that is costing all of us in Washington a great amount of money.
@57 You push my buttons with your rudeness.
That land that you bitch about being “taken” was PUBLIC LAND to begin with.
What are you trying to say here? Are you stating the private land all used to be public land? Are you taking the socialist party line that no one should be able to own land,
Just the State ? Are you confusing the USFS / WASHINGTON STATE Land with private land. I mean are you confusing the US Constitution with Marxism
O and by the way I bought my fair share as well as others from local mills in Ferry County.
@61 As in Mason County it is the rest of the state, in regard to forest practices.
A forest practice plan has to be developed any time timber is sold to a mill.
As you can see this precludes any damage to the community. If this practice does not work, one need look at the top down control of the Government agency with the oversight. Hope this helps.
%
“Had King County’s school districts been funded proportionate to what King County taxpayers put into state coffers, our schools would have received an additional one billion dollars from the state in 2008; now that’s the kind of data point, if properly understood, that could erode local, blue-county support for statewide solutions.”
“Which perhaps explains why so few lawmakers seem to want these data points properly understood.”
Is “had” different than IF and doesn’t the way this is phrased sound like King County is getting shorted additional one billion dollars or perhaps the Red counties are getting one billion dollars they should not. This Data point the author is so proud of is not even a data manipulation but a totally bogus stretch of the imagination.
And then again how much is the Growth Management Act (GMA)costing taxpayers as a flawed effort to try and do a good thing?
A word of wisdom from a red county don’t let this red county /haring distract us from the real money suck, the (GMA)
So basically if someone fucks something up, the government and vague notions of “socialist” (reading could help you) seattle know-it-alls provide a convenient scapegoat. Got it. Thanks!
Basically the problem is that what works in Okanagon or Walla Walla doesn’t work in Seattle, and vice versa. Seattle is very diverse, densely populated and heavily industrialized. Twisp isn’t any of those things. And the folks from Twisp get a bit tired of of Seattle liberals telling them how to live. They’ve lived that way for a long time, and it works for them. How about you self righteous libs leave them to do so?
At any rate Goldys numbers forget a few significant things, as they always do. Maybe King County does subsidize sparsely populated counties. If so, they do because Seattle requires an educated workforce to function and a lot of the folks educated in Wapato will end up there. Maybe King County subsidizes roads in agricultural communities, but if they do it benefits them in low cost fresh produce, beef and lamb from ranching, and some exceptional wines. For every ‘subsidy’ a direct benefit accrues to the whining Seattle liberal in the chic coffee house with the $90 haircut.
So how about this? I’ll agree that Seattle libs like how they live if they will allow me to live as I like in my suburban home on acreage. They may subsidize my brothers kids in Yakima schools. He and I subsidize an ineffective mass transit system I use once or twice a decade and he never will, baseball and football fields I didn’t ask for and think Seattle or the team owners should have paid for, and the general ability to whine about how awful this country is that liberals so love. (Not to mention that paying property tax in 3 counties while educating my kids privately means I subsidize education in all 3 counties while getting no direct benefit.) I won’t try to tell the smug hipsters on Capital HIll how to live if they’ll refrain from telling me how to do so. Fair enough?
Well, off to breakfast with the family, and leaving hotel internet service today for the journey back to Italy. No internet there, so I’ll wish you all a pleasant rest of February. I’d wish you a happy George Washingtons birthday, but liberals probably dislike Washington since they seem to dislike everything else about America.
@67 Nice to wish us a happy February but then turn around and tell us we hate America. Ah, SB, you’re so you!!!
@67 – I’ll listen to your opinions about Eastern Washington when you learn how to spell Okanogan correctly.
Again, Seattleblue is a troll from horsesass, where he went by the name of lostinaseaofblue, but everyone just called him lost. He is an intellectual shitstain who makes the same arguments over and over with out cease. He is tiresome and thick as a brick. Responding to his inanity is pointless and only encourages him.