[trendia]

Of course, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the article, but it's always funny when someone posts an article they didn't read. It directly contradicts what you're claiming:

> The red states aren't in fact poorer than the blue states. They're richer: that's why they vote more conservative and more right wing.

The article argues that people who make less move to areas with lower costs of living, because they have more purchasing power in those areas:

> Because those lower income places have even lower prices, making consumption standards higher.

That is, red states aren't poor because of red policies, they're poor because they're cheaper to live in.

Further, the article claims that blue policies hurt the poor!

> What we now need to go on and explain is why those nominally left policies, those blue ones, are so to the disadvantage of the poor they're supposedly helping....

[zaksoup]

I read the article. I don't think you read my comment. I posted the article to cite a positive interpretation of the statistics I claimed.

I made no claims about which policies were better or worse. If you have issues with the one claim I did make, that the implication that red states would fare poorly without blue states is not farfetched, I do not believe you have adequately articulated them.

From the article:

> Red state economies based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl may have lower wages, higher poverty rates and lower levels of education on average than those of blue states