Nov 03
A: Crime, high taxes, high costs, nasty traffic, corrupt government, unionized, and bad schools….
Q: Why do so many people flee blue states?
A: Crime, high taxes, high costs, nasty traffic, corrupt government, unionized, and bad schools….
Q: Why do so many people flee blue states?
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
It’s not surprising that older people have higher incomes than younger. Kotkin also didn’t mention that older people prefer a warmer climate.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I think the general thinking is why pay all this money to be cold.
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Finding interesting facts is straightforward, whereas deducing cause and effect from them is a lot trickier. Kotkin’s track record sounds like he does more fact-mining to support his theses than balanced analysis of the available facts. Internal population movements is a question that does not lend itself to easy insights and tempts pundits and politicians to misuse the facts in support of political ideas.
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:09 pm
It is an op ed piece. He can’t put in the Library of Congress.
Just ask NY where there taxpayers went.
November 4th, 2009 at 9:39 am
New York and the northern blue states have had those conditions forever. The main change from the 1930s to today is that the warm states got air-conditioning.
“Crime, high taxes, high costs, nasty traffic, corrupt government, unionized, and bad schools” in the blue states I wager are no worse than in other states with the same population density. Low tax states tend to have the worst public schools which of course isn’t a consideration for retirees. Those states also cannot afford good public services so that the rich will have to supply privately some of the things that the government supplies in the blue states. Unionization has been a declining factor for five decades to where it is mostly just a hot button for conservatives. Blue state places with nasty traffic also tend to have decent public transportation; warm states rely almost solely on private autos which turns what might be modest traffic into nightmares with Atlanta and Houston perhaps the worst. The red states have no bragging rights on corruption and sleazy politics. If you’re a culture vulture, you want New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston; if bass fishing is your thing, you want Arkansas, Georgia, and the like.
November 5th, 2009 at 7:46 am
http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/05/schools-taxes-education-biz-beltway_cz_cs_0705schools.html
It’s hard to correlate education success with taxes at the state level. I wonder why so much money taken in at the state level, e.g. lotteries, never reaches the pupil. Too much rake off?