OT Greater Idaho

Of course he does. He uses an outhouse for certain needs and a fireplace for heat and cooking. Doesn't he ride back and forth to the General Store on a mule?

 

Given the choice, I prefer incompetent liberal leadership to incompetent conservative leadership.

 

Man, it gets thick around here at times. Urban and rural areas need each other. The idea that urban areas are doing some great service to rural areas out of some sense of altruism is condescending bullshit. Most of the money spent is for roads that get used primarily by urban dwellers heading out to enjoy the great outdoors. I have a mental image of the chaos at the local Freddy's grocery section as people break out their knives and guns scrambling for the last can of beans on the vacant shelves. The electrical power that we're so addicted to gets generated in rural areas. The fuel to run our cars and resources to build everything we manufacture are extracted from rural areas.

 

I wasn't talking about roads linking cities with rural areas. The actual roads in small cities and towns in rural areas are generally funded by tax-payers in urban areas because rural areas can't afford all the infrastructure with just their own tax base.

And you may consider it "condescending bullshit," but I think it's a very important thing to note when conservatives in rural areas rail against urban liberals and how they have all the political power (despite the fact that the US political system disproportionately enfranchises rural voters) and often, hilariously, rail against social welfare, when rural areas are huge benefactors of social welfare in exactly this way. ABM seems like a major opponent of social welfare, but one of the largest social welfare projects in this nation was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which helped build up Tennessee into the state he's so proud of.

That's great, but that food and fuel isn't donated free of charge to urban areas. It's bought and paid for. So your implied claim that this balances the money that's invested into rural areas' infrastructure really doesn't hold water.

I personally don't think there's anything wrong or humiliating or condescending about being the benefactors of social welfare. I consider it the moral thing to do for people who need it in a society where we value everyone. But that's my liberal perspective. Conservatives have a huge problem with the idea of social welfare, but champion the rural areas as "real America" and the urban areas as crime-filled scum buckets filled with poor people who drain our taxes with their needs for social welfare.

 

Apparently, you missed my main point which is that urban and rural Americans NEED EACH OTHER. I didn't make any point about political largesse because I don't disagree with you on that. What I do have a problem with is the view that urban interests should dominate political discourse and have greater power simply because there are more people living in cities. Conversations about "fly-over states" and discussions that paint people who live in rural areas as stupid hicks are as stereotypical and wrong-minded as racial stereotypes. Increasingly, it seems that rural voices are interpreted as being Republican and urban voices are Democrat. That's largely because the parties work to feed the interests of "their constituencies" often to the detriment of other people who don't live in their areas. The conversations about rural areas breaking away from the more urban areas of Oregon and California don't happen in a vacuum. They result when people feel like they're not being heard and that people who don't give a crap about their issues adopt laws and administrative rules that have major economic impacts on farmers, ranchers and others who don't live in the cities. We're headed for an increasingly divided America unless our policy makers stop with all of the petty posturing and start listening to other people. I don't have a lot of hope about that happening.

 

I didn't miss that at all. To wit: "I personally don't think there's anything wrong or humiliating or condescending about being the benefactors of social welfare. I consider it the moral thing to do for people who need it in a society where we value everyone."

I recognize that everyone's needed. You're currently talking about people in rural communities that mine or farm, but it can easily be applied to people at the bottom of the economic food chain in urban areas, the people working two or three below-living-wage jobs. That was my point there.

Why shouldn't they have greater power when they have more people? To take this to extremes, do you think a town of 10 people should have equal power and representation to a city with 10 million people? To believe this, you'd have to believe that each person in that 10 person town is 10 million times more important than each person in the city.

And, if you do believe that, you're in luck--our terrible electoral system largely agrees with you and apportions power by land mass, not people. This isn't a democracy representative of people, it's a democracy representative of acreage.

I think you've gone too far over your skis on this point. You're absolutely correct when you say both rural communities and urban communities need each other--you immediately lose the plot when you outright state that it's an injustice that communities of more people have greater representation than communities of less people. That's exactly how a representative democracy is supposed to work. We need protections for minority communities, whether those are racial minorities or minorities like rural communities, but otherwise majorities do get greater power to determine policy. If that's unjust to you, representative democracy is not for you.

We're not headed there, we've been there for at least 20 years, probably longer.

 

Well, we're probably never going to agree on the issue of how a representative government should work with respect to distribution of power. I think that the founders got it about as close to "right" as is feasible in deciding to split the baby in dividing power between a population-based House and a states-rights-based Senate. This country is not now, and has never been, a representative democracy. It's a federal republic with a deliberate constitutional division between popular vote and states vote. That's not likely to ever change. What needs to change is that political parties should start working on platforms that are as inclusive as possible instead of their current path of being as divisive as possible.

 

That's not likely to ever change either, because the incentives are built in not to do that. The way the founders established the political system has led to a growing and inevitable divide between certain constituencies and builds in too many "safe" political posts (House seats in bright red or blue districts, for example). The incentives all point towards exciting your base as much as possible, driving up the voter engagement of "your team" and simply making gestures at bipartisanship to appear broadly acceptable. Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama played that game the best, IMO.

 

Part of the problem imo, is Federal Government is way to large and self serving without enough checks and balancers/accountability. Nowadays with media so engrained/embossed into every soul its easy to rally accusations to opposing parties, thus breeding polarizations more quickly. Take no prisoners, no compromise, no more effective mediation, conciliation and arbitration as there is no acceptance of being wrong or asked to give and take some for a common good.
The doctrine of, your either with us, or against us, has ruined the ability for people of differing views to come together, thats why you are now see a resurgence of segregation in many ways and I think we all know where that can lead.
Teach your children well...

 

How so? What are examples of it being too large and self-serving and not having enough accountability?

 

Well, that’s a point of view I guess. Not sure what it has to do with my post, but thanks for sharing.

Just to be clear, I am not in favor of the ”Greater Idaho” proposal. I do understand where the impetus comes from, however. Ignoring people’s frustrations generally leads to problems, whether it’s city people or country people.

 

I don’t think that’s entirely true. Hilary ignored the Midwest and it cost her the election. Biden retooled the platform and spent more time there selling his vision for America and now he’s president. It’s not that hard to let people know you give a shit.

 

The notion that the urban areas "pay" for the rural areas is a bit of a myth and misleading.

There was a huge debate about this a few years ago on this very message, and there were a few interesting graphics links that basically debunks this, at least on a per-capita basis.

 

Hillary was also historically disliked, along with Trump. I really don't think one can draw much of a lesson from her run or that election. I also don't think we can glean much from the 2020 election, since Trump was involved. I think it's a lot more complicated than "ignored the Midwest and lost."

But regardless of that, Presidential elections aren't really the point. Aside from reconciliation, you need 60 senators to pass anything--it's unlikely any party will get that many senators, absent something cataclysmic. You have a ton of "safe seats" in both the House and the Senate--people running for those seats only face competition from their own party, which incentivizes being as extreme as possible. There's no real bipartisanship possible when a large segment of both houses of Congress are pushed in the direction of ideological extremes. And even if could pick off one or two senators of the other party for your bill, that's useless since you need 60 votes--so there's not even an incentive to try and appeal to a few senators.

Not to mention, any bill that passes is seen as a win for the sitting President, which the minority party now refuses to allow to happen. McConnell pioneered this, but Democrats have followed along too.

I see virtually no avenue towards more bipartisanship and only avenues towards more polarization.

 

Feel free to show these debunks. Because I've seen a lot of numbers that show that highly urban areas pay much more in taxes than they get back in terms of services and infrastructure and rural areas get back much more than they pay in.

 

Well, that's just really depressing.

 

And the urban areas would still be paying for that stuff. Just like we do now.