Republican Freeloaders

This week Boehner has been raising campaign money from wealthy backers on the links at super-posh Muirfield Village Country Club in the hope of keeping the GOP in control of the House. One of the perks is a golf ball the classy drunken Speaker, according to Politico, gave out to his cronies-- a golf ball with Nancy Pelosi's face on it. Meanwhile Wall Street's boy in Wisconsin, Paul Ryan, is urgently asking rightists to send him money so he can advertise... in Iowa. Ryan doesn't exactly need grassroots contributions since he's taken $2,416,997 in legalistic bribes from the Financial Sector, far more than any other politician in the history of Wisconsin. Ryan and Boehner have been desperately running around to every open mike either can find to insist that the S&P downgrade they forced the country into-- and which was cheered by their teabagger followers (and which resulted in the current stock market crash)-- wasn't their fault; it was Obama's fault! If Obama can be faulted in any way, it was for having too much patience with their nihilism, treason and willful, obvious agenda to destroy the American economy in the name of the 2012 campaign.

Ever since the credit rating agency S&P downgraded U.S. credit to AA+ on Friday night, Republicans have desperately trying to pin the blame on President Obama, even though, as National Journal put it, “it’s hard to read the S&P analysis as anything other than a blast at Republicans.” S&P called out the GOP for using the debt ceiling as a political football and for its flat refusal to consider new revenue as part of any plan to reduce long-term deficits.

Earlier this week Rep. Allen West (R-FL) claimed that the S&P downgrade “has nothing to do with increasing revenues,” while some Republicans have said that passing a Balanced Budget Amendment would have prevented the downgrade, both of which S&P disagreed with. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday jumped into the same pool, saying that the downgrade could have been avoided if only Democrats had embraced the House Republican budget and its plan to eliminate Medicare:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blamed President Obama and the Democrats Tuesday for the recent downgrading of the U.S. credit rating, saying that if Democrats had joined with Republicans in passing the GOP budget, which the House passed in April, “it’s unlikely anyone would be talking about the United States being downgraded today.”

Both Boehner's and Ryan's states' citizens pay about the same in federal taxes as comes back to them from the federal government in terms of services and infrastructure. Yet both lead the Republican squawkbox against federal taxes that basically subsidize the freeloader Republican states, especially Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, West Virginia, the Dakotas, Louisiana, Alaska, and South Carolina. The state's the give far more than they get in return include Minnesota, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware... all blue states. PoliticalProf, who lives in Illinois, wants his money back:

Most people don’t understand that the federal government doesn’t really take taxes to put in a gilded room in DC to buy teak desks for Senators. Rather, much of the federal government’s operations are a pass through program, meaning taxes taken today are sent out to program beneficiaries today. Both Social Security and Medicare work this way, for example-- and that’s over 40% of the US budget.

As it happens, it is usually the case that the citizens living in a state do not receive the same amount in total benefits and other federal spending as they contribute. The citizens of some states—the ones in various shades of green in this map-- pay more in taxes than they receive. The ones in red receive more federal tax money than its citizens pay.

While the pattern is not perfect, a few things stand out here. First, many “conservative” states are in fact net tax recipients-- e.g., they get more than they pay. Many such states have lots of poverty, farms, military bases and retired persons, and such persons and programs get lots of federal tax support.

Another thing that stands out here is that, in general, the “rich”-- or net tax contributing-- states are those with the United States’ major cities: NY, California, Illinois, Texas, Georgia, etc. (The latter two are exceptions to the “conservative = welfare states point I made above.)

UPDATE

Turns out Boehner wasn't the one handing out the Nancy Pelosi golf balls. Politico reported the story wrong; it was some other right wing idiot.