Moochers and Contributors

A Republican friend was trying to explain to me how Obama voters are takers, moochers and beneficiaries of federal largess, while Romney voters are responsible, tax-paying contributors to America's well-being. There are exceptions, of course, such as me, Ty, who pays taxes, my friend acknowledges; but the vast majority of Obama supporters (i.e., liberals, Democrats, minorities) are those who "get something for nothing" from the federal government. This explains how Obama won the election, in particular, and explains how and why any Democrat/Liberal wins any election in general.

To help my friend illustrate this political fact of life, which everybody knows because Rush Limbaugh and Fox News repeat it over and over and over again, I searched the internet for some maps.

One of the maps at right shows, in red, all of the states that are net beneficiaries of federal tax dollars. In other words, for each dollar that the residents of state pay in federal taxes, they get back more than one dollar worth of benefits. The states in blue, by contrast, are net contributors to the federal government; for each dollar of taxes they send to Washington, they get back less than a dollar worth of benefits.

The other map shows the results of the 2012 presidential election, with states which voted for Obama shown in blue and states which voted for Romney shown in red.

The object of this exercise is to identify which map shows voting patterns and which map shows welfare distribution. If you were to have trouble determining which map were which, you might see some correlation between the two sets of data.

BUT WAIT, you say, I don't know how to read maps; all those little lines are confusing (as a woman friend once said to me). Okay, let's make it more clear and easier to understand. Following is a chart that shows somewhat more info than the maps; for each dollar sent to Washington, the chart shows the exact amount returned to each state. The states are also marked red for Romney, blue for Obama, and are divided into net contributors (left column) and net beneficiaries (right column).

(Text continues below graph.)

The point of this posting, in case it was too subtle for you, is to illustrate that yet again, a "core position / assumption" of the political right is simply false. It is fabricated. It is a lie. The sources of information that spread these lies are what we call "liars." They spread lies because they want you to believe something that benefits them, not you, and certainly not us (the country). They are not accidentally overlooking things, or the victims of bad data, or entitled to their own opinions. They deliberately and specifically lie to you and the rest of the world because it benefits them to do so. 

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Sources: The Centrist Word (chart), Politico (political map), Balloon Juice (welfare map). Note that data and maps are not quite perfect, and don't align perfectly with reality, due to different dates and emphasis. (New Mexico, for example, is shown as red in the chart, but actually voted for Obama; the discrepancy is due to the fact that this chart was made before the election and was based on the likely vote.) The purpose of this posting is to show patterns.