Why are Red State Citizens Poorer, Less Educated, & Sicker than Blue State Citizens?

^ And how it's bad news for Biden and Harris

I love Tom Hartmann - he's a brilliant man - and he makes some good points, but a bit too much of a broad brush.

A lot of the red states are like that because of lack of economic opportunity and investment - many of these states are really remote from water and train transportation.

Many southern states have never recuperated from the Civil War economic loss - seriously.

A discussion can be made about geography. New Mexico is a blue state and also has a lot of these problems.

Not that Republican policies are helping the red states much at all anyways.

OP, after the Civil War Plantation Owners were damned if they were going to pay whites any more than freed slaves and the conservative party, ever since Reconstruction, has had its fundamental capitalist policies set on keeping workers, black and white, poor, sick and stupid.

It is the foundation of the current Republican Party to never spend a fucking dime on Americans and to fight like hell for tax cuts. Republicans do not want to pay for ANYTHING. Get rid of the Department of Education, save money teach the Bible, Never give Educational loan relief. Republicans do not want an educated workforce. Minimum wages? Are you fucking nuts? Infrastructure Week was NEVER coming, never fucking ever, as spending on infrastructure only means that workers don't have to drive on gravel to get to work. Or take ferries. And the real reason that they hate Obama care is that they hate ALL health care. It wasn't until Lieberman added privater healthcare to the ACA that it passed. What this means is that they are making huge profits off of ObamaCare and they STILL hate it. Who needs a healthy workforce, and all this Biden union shit is going to be off shored as soon as Trump becomes president. Just like Nixon and Reagan and poof, America turns into a HUGE Rust Belt.

Trump is going to do what every vulture capitalist has done to every good business that they overtake. Trump is going to deconstruct the economy, outsource as much as possible, deconstruct huge segments of the economy and send the savings from the "cost-cutting", not to reducing the Debt, but by putting the cash into the pockets of the Rich.

All those stupid Patriots are going to have to sell their guns to eat, let alone pay for medicine.

Keep em sick, keep em stupid, keep em poor. The perfect American Capitalist Vulture workforce.

Rethugs: In order for me to be truly rich and powerful, many of you must stay poor and powerless. It's a sacrifice we're willing to make.

Cheap labor is a benefit, but they just don’t believe that government should support people because “those people” are lazy and don’t deserve it.

Take New Jersey as an example. It's a solidly blue state and one of the wealthiest. It ranks high in education and income.

But you want to see citizens that are poorer, less educated and sicker? Go to Camden, Newark, Atlantic City.

Pennsylvania....a blue state. But go to Philadelphia. " ....federal data, collected by advocacy group Achieve Now, shows 52% of Philadelphia's adults are functionally illiterate."

Corruption, bad education, bad healthcare, bad government, almost no unions.

[quote] But you want to see citizens that are poorer, less educated and sicker? Go to Camden, Newark, Atlantic City.

They may be relatively poor, but they are much better off than the poorest people in Mississippi and Louisiana.

[quote] "Republicans worship cheap labor — and having a steady and reliable supply of cheap labor requires widespread poverty…"

This is also the theater behind the so called immigration debate. Republicans and their donors WANT cheap immigrants here to do work for next to nothing. They just wish those same immigrants would have the decency to die after a single use, like a tissue, so the cost of their existence.

Yes, there's absolutely spots in blue states too that are filled with poverty and illiteracy. Those places have been starved of investment and resources for 50, 60, 70 years now. It's hard to reverse something that's gone so deep, something perpetuated for generations.

Why Less Educated, & Sicker than Blue State Citizens Red States?

[quote] Why Less Educated, & Sicker than Blue State Citizens Red States?

Huh?

^red state education

Covevee

Wouldn't it also be a good question to ask the reverse: Why do more people in these states vote red? Simple causalities hardly work. You also keep forgetting that majorities aren't large at all, so you're letting yourself be divided while forgetting how similar people are, everywhere.

Mississippi has so little infrastructure that it is more of a territory than a fully-fledged state

R2, one of the reasons the South lost the Civil War was that it was underdeveloped economically. It had no industrial base to destroy. The region was always devoted to recreating feudalism and it’s stayed stuck in that fantasy model to this day.

Red state citizens vote to keep themselves poor, less educated and sicker. Blue state residents vote for equity in pay and benefits, vote to fund education, and vote to provide healthcare to everyone. OP's question should be "Why do red state residents consistently vote against their self interests?"

[quote]They may be relatively poor, but they are much better off than the poorest people in Mississippi and Louisiana.

I hardly think so.

[quote]one of the reasons the South lost the Civil War was that it was underdeveloped economically.

That's bullshit, R16. At the start of the Civil War, the Confederate states were vastly economically superior and if we consider them a separate country, the Southern economy would have ranked 4th largest in the world. It's agricultural base of cotton and tobacco provided ample profits to fund a war to, ironically, keep Blacks enslaved. And that was the difference between the North and the South; the North had burgeoning industry of the future that ran on fossil fuels, while the South had aged agriculture fueled by forced free labor and human trafficking.

R4 - I will expand on that comment. The vast percentage of the social ills stem from one issue: poverty.

Crime is always the path out for people who don't have access to the system to pull themselves up. A lack of opportunity creates a cycle of despair poverty - the impoverished areas have households of parental and financial insecurity, which leads to less involved parents, disruptive students, inability to go to college, higher teenage pregnancy rates, higher levels of sickness - due to stress and inability to afford medical services, etc.

Republicans want to hoover up all the money to the upper class and leave the bottom fighting for scraps. Meanwhile they get a good percentage of the middle class to look down on the lower class because of crime, social benefits, etc. and it also keeps them in check because they desperately don't want to go down to that level.

R19 - agreed - slaves were 'capital' that was erased from the system. Besides lack of industry though, you also had carpetbaggers and Northern banks that took advantage of the dire economic conditions in the South after the war.

A lot of the good universities in the North had private benefactors and financial donations from the wealthy and industry. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Vanderbilt, Duke, Tulane, Emory and maybe Davidson College as good solid universities in the South. But hardly any in the 'deepest' agriculture states - MS, AL, SC.

But the hot environment also prevented those states from growing like the North before widespread AC was available. Now those states are making some progress, but they are way behind most other states.

Red states - besides Texas - are almost all agricultural states or western mountain areas. It's absurd how much of our government policies are dictated by these little states and their backward attitudes.

I will say this - States Rights was one of the worst policies to ever come out of the Republic. The ability of each state to basically run like its own country with a patchwork of rights, laws, voting rules and the ability for them to keep wages low and to refuse Medicaid and federal funding for the poor - it's disgusting.

It was a good idea 150-250 years ago with each state developing and the lack of modern communication - but now it's just a bunch of fuckwits in each state's legislators with a bunch of goobers thinking they're all important and smart.

[quote]Crime is always the path out for people who don't have access to the system to pull themselves up.

No it's not.