I don't make a lot of personal posts so please bear with me. #Rufus hasn't been doing well for the past week or so. I mean, he's 13 (at least), and has slowed down due to age, but the past week or two he's been acting like every movement is a Herculean effort. A few times in the past couple of weeks his rear legs have given out on him completely to where I've had to pick him up and carry him which is, in itself, telling. Rufus has always hated being carried and struggled continuously when I did so. Yesterday while petting him I noticed two golf-ball sized things up under his chin. Now, they may be benign lipomas as Rufus is covered with them (one one each thigh, one on each shoulder, one on his chest and a few smaller bumps here and there) or they may be indicative of something else. I'm no vet and aside from emergency medic battlefield training I have no medical experience whatsoever, but these new things seem to be where your or mine lymph nodes are located....
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Not what people normally consider 'welfare'.
If you want to talk about welfare as it is generally understood: one third of all welfare recipients in the nation live in Democrat controlled California.
And yourself.
A State getting more than it gives in is usually not because of social welfare programs, but fed spending on roads or military bases or the like. That was my point, which is what is missed by those talking about 'red welfare states'. That is done to mislead people into thinking people that vote Republican are more likely to get welfare. Spending on roads and military bases is not what people consider 'welfare'.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/26/blog-posting/red-state-socialism-graphic-says-gop-leaning-state/
Or this one from 2015: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-24093
http://taxfoundation.org/blog/which-states-rely-most-federal-aid-0
So, I believe my premise was correct: red states, those states where the voters tend to vote Republican, are moochers off the remaining, more liberal, states.
From the PolitiFact citation:
"How do you define red and blue states?
The graphic defines Republican states as those "that have voted Republican in a previous presidential election." Because the data is from 2005, that means states that voted for George W. Bush in 2004, which is a larger number than voted Republican in 2008.
But the definition of states as Republican or Democratic isn't immutable. Just four years later, in the 2008 election, six states in the right-hand chart and three states in the left-hand chart switched from Republican to Democratic, making both charts more heavily blue.
We should also note that some of the margins of victory were quite narrow. In fact, a dozen or more states can be characterized in most elections as swing states, which might be more appropriately shaded in purple.
The data is seven years old
As we noted, the data is for 2005. To the author’s credit, this is disclosed prominently, and because it’s the most recent data of its type available, we can hardly fault the creator of the graphic for using it. Still, since the data has almost certainly shifted in the interim, particularly with the 2009 stimulus and the general increase in deficit spending, those patterns could have shifted as well.
"Because of the high deficit spending we’re seeing at the federal level, it’s likely that every state is currently receiving more in federal spending than its population paid in federal income taxes," the Tax Foundation's Morrison said."
Pretty weak.
You know what it is. And it's not based on any reality.
No reason to do so. It was tedious enough the first time.
Wealthy live in NYC for proximity. They tolerate a great deal of shakedown from municipal factotums to do so.
Overtaxing of the wealthy will only drive them offshore, as many have already done.