Weekly UnUniting Roundup
Some news and facts, in case you missed them.
Now, I’m not committing to releasing a weekly roundup on a basis that’s, um, weekly or anything. I just don’t know when “news” will come out, as it pertains to the issues we explore here - secession, state partitioning, and the like.
But there were some interesting reports and facts released this week…
National Divorce
According to the Washington Examiner, 1 in 5 Americans now support a “national divorce” (as per the wording of Marjorie Taylor Greene).
Who supports this the most? If you guessed “Republicans”… well, you’re not wrong, exactly - 25% of them do, versus 16% of Democrats.
But most interestingly, Independents polled the highest (19%) when asked if they would support their own state seceding from the country. This should give pause to any partisan dreaming of ‘red’ or ‘blue’ state utopias, because if we read ‘independent’ as ‘the silent middle’1 - this would seem to indicate that it’s everyday non-partisans who are starting to feel itchy.
Another interesting nugget: most likely to support the split are men, people who make less than $50,000 a year, and people from the South and West. Perhaps none of this is surprising, but it does hint at the color of the national divorce mood - it’s probably mainly about people feeling like they want to pay less taxes.
Speaking about Taxes…
A new report came out from WalletHub, 2023’s States with the Best and Worst Taxpayer ROI. This was a fascinating read2.
Some key takeaways:
If you’re looking for the best state that combines both the lowest taxes and the most you get back for your money, it’s New Hampshire.
The worst is California.
Overall, red states perform better on these two measures, with Florida, South Dakota, Wyoming, Texas, Ohio and Iowa in the top ten.
However, the report is more than a little misleading. If I am reading it right, it ranks by correlating low overall [state + federal] taxes with best overall government services. Of course, the states that have no income tax will automatically rank higher. And then it just ranks the states based on average between the two scores - which is how Florida, which has middling government services but low taxes, comes in at #2.
What it doesn’t seem to take into account is how much each state receives from the federal government. Some of the states ranking well in the ‘government services’ column take a disproportionate amount of money from the federal government compared to what they pay in taxes - and it just so happens that the majority of these are red states.
Then when we dig into the details of the quality of actual government services [which the report extrapolates from areas of education, health, safety, the economy, infrastructure and pollution], we get an entirely different picture:
8 out of the top 10 states with the best services are blue states. Only two (Utah and Iowa) are red.
8 out of the bottom 10 states, those with the worst services, are red states. Only two (New Mexico and Arizona) are bluish.
I’m not sure if there’s a political lean in WalletHub here, but I do want to caution people from drawing too many conclusions from this list. You could look at this and say “if I want to save money, I should move to a red state,” or you could say “if I want to be healthier, safer, smarter and better employed, I should move to a blue state.”
It’s a relative ranking, anyway!
Happiness
I just posted about how we can measure other countries based on Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - and how America was coming up short.
Well, just in time, the World Happiness Report came out again - and once again, it’s the usual suspects out on top. Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Israel and the Netherlands make the top 5.
However, it looks like the U.S. has actually inched up a bit - we are number 15. Which isn’t too shabby.
It’s almost like all this stress and fighting is… making us happier? If you have any thoughts on why this might be, I’d love to hear them.
Incidentally, I also remarked in my post about the different types of governments that were showing up the best in the L/L/H rankings. For your future reference, Digg put out a handy chart of the types of world governments.
See you next week!
Although maybe we shouldn’t? Independents can be, of course, people who decide between the Democratic or Green parties, or Republican or Libertarian parties.
For people like me, anyway.