(H/T: Real Clear Politics) You know what the single most entertaining part of this NYT article (“Is Life Better in America’s Red States?”) is? It’s that nowhere in it is it acknowledged that people have been voting with their feet for the last two decades or so. Depending on how you score Florida and Nevada, blue states lost between 8 and 11 net Electoral votes* (and, hence, seats) in the last Census – and everybody really expects that trend to continue. For all the NYT’s worship of the blue state model that will pioneer “the new economic order that will determine our future — one that turns on innovation and knowledge rather than the raw production of goods,” it remains true that the only Blue State that is somehow still making the model work for it on a demographic level is Washington State**.
And, let’s be honest: it’s infinitely easier to write code in Salt Lake City than it is to open up a firearms factory in Schenectady these days. So unless you’re there to make the scene, I’m not exactly sure why you’d want to live in the Northeast…
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Possibly even more omniously for Democrats: California didn’t pick up a seat in the last Census. It may lose a seat in the next one. That should cause an entertaining amount of panic among Democratic politicians…
**I have no real idea why, either. You’d think that people would research that…
OMG that NYT article is full of bile. He zaps it’s the “divide” that’s the problem, but it’s the Red States’ behavior that is causing the divide. This is a distillation if the biostatistics elites’ disdain for flyover country.
I love how he says our model isn’t “sustainable”.
Despite it being many times moreso than his.
What scene? Posing for a chalk outline?
Food and Energy production will still be important long after the knowledge economy is dust.
… it remains true that the only Blue State that is somehow still making the model work for it on a demographic level is Washington State …
Boeing and Microsoft. But Boeing wants to move its work to non-union states, and Microsoft’s future looks less bright than it once did.
No doubt about it, Microsoft products are sub-par these days.
These days? They’ve been sub-par since Windows 1.0. DR DOS was a much better OS than MS DOS; it was only the bogus ‘non-fatal error’ that Windoze gave when you tried to run it under DR DOS that kept MS DOS alive.
Also, the I’ve gotten the impression that Cascadia(the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver axis) has replaced California as the latest Hipster-Mecca, where all the trust-fund babies go to spend their way into coolness without regard for productive economics.
.. Portland has been hippies and hipsters serving food and drink to one another in 8 hour shifts for a long time now .. can’t speak to Seattle, although I suspect it’s similar just with fewer hippies..
.
Mew
And even less hygiene.
Plus Washington state isn’t a full Blue Model anyways because of their lack of income taxes.
Not for lack of trying to impose an income tax, though.
The day they pass it is the day Washington sees a *huge* moneyed exodus.
.
Mew
It actually all comes back to Boeing; you wouldn’t have Microsoft, Amazon, or Adobe there without it. Boeing needed and hired smart people to the Seattle area to build airplanes, and their kids built the tech companies (Bill Gates in particular). There is an intellectual culture there precisely because of heavy manufacturing.
it wasn’t that long ago that we led the world in both innovation and knowledge, and in raw production of goods. i guess working in a factory is pretty demeaning tho, as is living in a country that does that kinda thing.
When Bush spoke of “work Americans won’t do,” he wasn’t far off. #MikeRoweForPOTUS
There are pockets of sanity here in the Northeast, namely Almost-Canada AKA 2nd-district Maine. If we can get a gas pipeline past the NIMBYS in Boston-North(a mini-Keystone situation) we’ll do okay with the next four years of mostly-GOP governanace.