David Stockman, Reagan’s OMB director, rips tax-cut fairy-tale economics of current GOP, brilliantly sums up crisis: http://nyti.ms/9wrHSM
David Stockman, Reagan’s OMB director, rips tax-cut fairy-tale economics of current GOP, brilliantly sums up crisis: http://nyti.ms/9wrHSM
This tweet has so many flaws, I almost don’t know where to begin. But let’s start with the referenced author, David Stockman, who is erroneously credited here with far too much gravitas with the label, “Reagan’s OMB director”. Stockman exiled himself from Reagan’s economic policy circle almost from Day One with his early, withering criticisms of the tax cut agenda and supply-side basis for it. Positing him as a fair representative of the Reagan administration would be akin to considering Gen. MacChrystal as a reliable spokesperson for Obama’s Afghanistan war policy.
The second thing I’ll point out about Mr. Stockman is that his criticisms haven’t changed from the article that originally got him in trouble, or his 1986 book that cemented his exile from Republican policy circles. In other words, he’s been singing the same anti-supply-side hymn since before the supply-siders even had a chance to enact their agenda, indicating that his opposition is first and foremost grounded in ideology, with the data he cites being filtered through that prism to support his agenda.
Now let’s talk about some of Mr. Stockman’s actual arguments. First he attacks Sen. McConnell for his “unseemly” opposition to letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Fortunately, Arthur Laffer has an article in today’s WSJ that illustrates why soaking the rich doesn’t work. You’d think we’d have learned from the millionaire tax hikes implemented in California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, but alas, people still fail to get the message that raising taxes on “the rich” almost always depresses tax revenue — for instance, when Maryland raised its taxes, instead of the projected $106M increase in revenue, millionaires paid $100M less the following year.
Stockman goes on to complain about trade deficits. Trade deficits may or may not be a big problem, but they have little to do with the argument at hand. Still, many economists see little to be concerned about since our trade partners by-and-large use their trade surpluses with us to buy American assets (dollars, Treasury bonds, real estate, and corporate capital). Suffice it to say, our global trading partners are voting with their feet in support of the American economic engine.
Stockman’s next bugaboo is deficit spending. However, he loses all credibility as soon as he makes this statement: “This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.” This statement is laughable on its face given that the vast majority of deficit spending has accrued under Democratic Congresses. Even the drunken-sailor ways of the Republican Congress under Bush, for all its profligacy, pales in comparison to what the Dems under Obama have unleashed in a very short period of time. In any event, there’s no charitable way to put this: Stockman’s argument is contrary to the facts.
On a side note, I am amused by Stockman’s blaming of the “neocons” for “pushing the military budget skyward” in the 1980s. Hardly anybody knew what a neoconservative was in the 1980s; the support for the military buildup he describes was a simple hawkish view shared by many on the right (including more than a few Congressional Democrats like Sen. Scoop Jackson), very few of whom would’ve identified with the term. It’s fair to say neoconservatives supported hawkish military spending in the 1980s, but Stockman is clearly driven to smear neoconservatives by assigning them blame for things over which they had virtually no influence. This is yet another example of his ideological aversion to Reaganism coloring his view of the facts.
Stockman’s third argument actually has some traction, crying foul over the financial industry’s reliance on cheap Fed money and lax controls on speculation and leveraged bets. Still, I have no idea why he thinks this can be laid at the feet of Republicans. Everything he rails against in these paragraphs is a product of government coziness with Wall Street going back to the Clinton administration, and is almost perfectly evidenced by the rotating door of Goldman Sachs executives joining administrations from both sides of the aisle. Funny then that the only people crying foul over the cozy Washington relationships of the financial-political class are the despised Tea Party folks. The Dems talk a populist game, but even under Obama, the likes of Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, and Chris Dodd know where their bread is buttered, and the end result of their increased regulations and oversight of Wall Street is the smothering of smaller enterprises and strengthened government involvement in the very “wards of the state” Stockman reviles.
The last Stockman point is a pseudo-protectionist rant about the loss of jobs to foreign shores. I won’t even bother with this one — he should just read his fellow ideological traveler’s book, The World is Flat.
In sum, the only “fairy-tale economics” here are the ones being fluffed by Brendan and Stockman.
AML, I call bullshit on this:
You take deficit as percentage of GDP at a point where GDP plummets. Even if spending stayed absolutely level, as a percentage spending would skyrocket. This is the same cherry picking statistics that suit your argument that you accuse Stockman of. Lies, damn lies, and statistics mate. That problem can cut you on both sides.
Not to mention inheriting two wars and an economic disaster the likes of which this country has seldom (if ever) seen and it takes a lot of balls to make that argument.
The government coziness of which you speak predates Clinton. If we are being honest it predates, hmm… let me think about that one, As far as I know there have really only been two “modern” presidents not to have the Wall Street coziness issue. One was a Democrat, the other was a Republican but they were both name Roosevelt. And to find others, you’d need to go back to at least Lincoln and probably more like Jackson, if there are any other besides the Roosevelts a point on which I remain rather un-convinced.
So, much as we might not like to admit it, this has long been a government of those with money, for those with money, by those with money. We only occasionally get a little progressive or a little populist, and then people like you start crying about socialism… In pure capitalism, you get what you pay for (If you can’t come up with at least three meanings for that last sentence, you’ve failed to get my meaning).
We have a lot of problems in this country, and we will not solve any of them unless we all put on our big girl and big boy pants and realize that we are in a pretty damn big mess and most of the long term solutions involve a pretty damn big paradigm shift. There is a laundry list of problems, the solutions make people uncomfortable with the realization they might need to live a little different. So we all continue to walk towards a cliff. And I’m certainly as guilty as the next person on some of those issues.
we all put on our big girl and big boy pants and realize that we are in a pretty damn big mess and most of the long term solutions involve a pretty damn big paradigm shift.
You mean turn away from the failed policy of big brother, big government, and federal domination to return to a system of limited government, federalism and self-reliance?
Umm, please recall the recessions in both the 1890’s and 1930’s caused by the exact policy points you are presently advocating.
Sorry, pleas try again.
A paradigm shift, by definition, does not involve your traditional thinking.
The prosperity in the US for the last 20 years has been the result of pure luck and manipulation. The Tech boom in the stock market back in the 90s was millions of Americans gambling and pushing stocks up to numbers that were totally unsubstantiated and it created a ton of wealth based on nothing (or an idea at best). Then lending practices were de-regulated completely and people turned their homes and real estate into credit cards and sucked all the value out of them and spent it and invested it in something else, fantasy-time is over now, and it’s time to pay the piper until the next get-rich-quick scheme sweeps the nation.
dcl, you clearly failed to read my hypertexted links, which contained the bulk of my arguments (my paragraph which you quoted was not even a summary of them). The issue is not deficit as a percentage of GDP; that’s Stockman’s metric, not mine.
The rest of your comment (about coziness between Wall Street and government) only reinforces my point that you can hardly blame that on Republicans, since it’s been endemic since at least Clinton (you’re merely arguing it goes back to, well, forever, not just to Clinton).
Anyway, go read the links to my earlier comments on the previous thread and then let’s talk about the Dems role in deficit spending vs. those evil GOP tax-cutters.
dcl #4 – I’ll have to look up the recession in the 1890s – but the one in the 1930s was prolonged and deepened into the Great Depression by the policies remarkably similar to the ones that *you* and your Leaders in the White House and current Congress (and immediatrely prior Congress) continue to insist upon, in spite of the available lessons of history …
For my part, I’ve been refreshed by Brendan’s highlighting of this most recent period of soul-searching among conservative intellectuals (arguably including Stockman).
It’s been marked by the basic realization that tax cuts don’t do shit to shrink government. You shrink government by shrinking spending. If you cut taxes but don’t cut spending, you still have big government. You just pay the bill later on.
I hope this thread of rationality weaves its way into the conservative movement and the Republican party.
Alaisdair: Uh, I think you have that backwards. There is strong correlation between when countries got off the gold standard and started deficit spending and how soon they recovered.
Casey, I’m not sure that’s good faith. Even the most head-in-the-sand “starve the beast” ideologue would admit that cutting taxes could only possibly slow or shrink the size of government by forcing a reduction in spending at some point down the road. The supply-side argument (and really, you should know this stuff — no need to make scarecrows here) is that tax cuts spur faster GDP growth and higher revenues long-term, such that after the initial revenue drop (which will be less than predicted per static scoring), the rate of GDP growth and consequently tax revenue growth is higher than if you had left the tax rates alone. Thus, tax revenues will rebound faster than predicted (which is why supply-siders argue for the so-called dynamic scoring). From what I’ve seen, except at the low end of the Laffer Curve, this theory holds up against the data; where the gray and fudging exist is, how fast is the GDP (and tax revenue) growth, and how much of that can you prove was the result of tax cuts against a baseline of non-tax cuts that is now hypothetical and doesn’t exist? Republican tax-cutters are prone to pretend there is no dip at all, and that revenues will rebound almost instantly such that hardly anyone will notice. That’s hogwash, but then so also are their opponents’ claims that GDP would have grown at the same rate under higher marginal tax rates.
My personal take (obviously supported with only the lightest of empirical analysis) is that the Reagan tax cuts grew revenue as predicted, but that the Bush tax cuts did not. I attribute this difference largely to the fact that Reagan’s tax cuts were more drastic and permanent, and occurred in a stagflationary environment with concurrent high interest rates and high marginal tax rates. The Bush tax cuts were less drastic and less permanent, interest rates were at or near record lows, and the economy was relatively healthy despite the post-stock bubble / post-9/11 economic lull. That and they were oversold by the Republican administration and Congress, who wanted to have their cake and eat it too by increasing spending as well (they saw no need to sacrifice butter for guns and actually expanded the Medicare entitlement with the Rx bill). In the end, the tax cuts had a positive impact, but this was largely eroded by the real estate / finance bubble and the deficit spending.
Unfortunately, because of how Obama structured the stimulus and expanded government outlays, we are not in a position to offer tax cuts to jumpstart the economy; that train left the station 12-16 months ago. The best we can hope for now is to leave tax rates alone and tinker around the edges with structural tax reform and reduced spending (“austerity”). What this country needs is a slimmer tax code, a slimmer regulatory environment, and a slimmer government budget.
Jim Kelly #9 – I’m referring to the non-GDP-growth-encouraging spending of the Obama Administration which could be being dictated by Hoover and FDR … the recession of the early 1930s was deepened and prolonged by government policies – and, indeed, even in the later 1930s, there was another significant GDP growth problem which seemed only to be rectified by the gearing up for WW II …
What we need just now are
1) Better/inceased domestic energy sources – industrial-levels, not just “only during daylight/windy hours” … nuclear, currently is the most robust, and the sooner we get more such power plants started, the sooner we get the power from them …
2) Increased domestic production of resources – whether oil or produce or food (and, no, not way-too-expensive maizohol) …
3) Increased small businesses producing stuff that folk would like to buy – and the folk employed by such businesses end up buying the stuff …
We *don’t* need
a) More folk counting beans for the purposes of gerrymandering or taxation …
b) More taxation taking away from the funds required to start/continue small businesses
c) More schemes like Obamacare, arrogating control/power to a Washington, DC elite without reducing costs/improving efficiency …
d) Obama/Pelosi/FReid levels of spending making the Bush budgets look comparatively positively penurious …
e) The dropping of the Bush Tax cuts across the board …
this may have been a better fit in the thread from a from a few days ago (y’know, that 30-comment one), but it applies here too i think. to anyone who honestly believes liberals are better at controlling debt than conservatives, please explain what’s illustrated here:
http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/state_debt/index.html
Alasair: I guess it’s you bein’ a furriner and all, but I don’t quite get what you are saying in your first paragraph. If you are agreeing that a stubbornness to commit to stimulus prolonged the great depression than sure, I guess we’re all in agreement.
Sully: I don’t think anyone is necessarily arguing that liberals are better at controlling debt than conservatives, more that neither are very good and we need to have an honest discussion about what the right balance of taxation and shrinking budgets is, rather than act like children.
ok, i guess a slight revision of wording would help. people certainly have argued that liberal policies are and would be better at shrinking the deficit than conservative policies. The overall portfolio of policies enacted by Bush and by congress when held by Republicans over the past decade certainly would not make it onto a poster for “conservative fiscal policies.” however, everyone can agree that red states have generally had more conservative fiscal policies than blue states in recent decades. so here’s a more applicable request. to anyone who honestly believes liberal policies are better for controlling the debt than conservative policies, please explain the illustration shown on the previously linked website.
Well first off, it’s ridiculous to posit that liberal or conservative policies are better for controlling debt. The only thing that is good for controlling debt is balancing a budget. That’s neither a liberal nor conservative idea.
I suppose one could attempt to argue that short-term stimulus spending not offset is a more “liberal” policy, but of course the counter-argument would be that it’s to avoid a “lost decade” kind of recession, and certainly it’s debatable whether or not that kind of stimulus could pay for itself.
Either way, the more relevant concern is long-term spending, and in that case, as I said above, balancing a budget seems to have no party affiliation.
As to your example about state debt, you throw up a link with a chart with no argument about why it applies, nor even any analysis about what the difference is overall between debt in red states and blue states. Further, by what metric are you considering this? Who is in power now? I know in my state of Maryland, Ehlrich (R) grew the state budget at a rate of nearly 8% a year, where as O’Malley’s (D) budget grew around 3% per year. Now granted O’Malley’s term has been through tough economic times, certainly it’s hard to compare directly to someone who governed during relatively good times. But that’s the point, fiscal restraint is most important during good times, and at least in my state it was a Republican who put us in the position we’re in, and a Democrat left with the tough choices. I think O’Malley has done a good job making some reasonable cuts, shrinking the number of state employees on the payroll and actually reducing the general fund budget.
This is not to point out that I think Democrats are inherently better at this than Republicans, but just to point out that at least in this blue state, a Republican Governor was part of the problem, rather than the solution. So I don’t think it’s so cut and dry to just quickly glance and a map and try to establish which party is good at what.
you do realize that the slate of governing statutes isn’t wiped clean when a new governor is elected, right? you can’t possibly argue that a state like Wyoming (Democrat governor for the past 8 years) has fiscal policies that are overall more liberal than what Maryland had during Ehrlich’s years. think of things like tax code, entitlement programs, government employee unionization, etc. Even with Ehrlich as governor, Maryland still had relatively liberal fical policies.
balancing a budget certainly is not exclusively a liberal or conservative idea, but that chart shows that states with more conservative fiscal policies generally end up closer to a balanced budget than those with more liberal fiscal policies. i don’t think the chart really needs an “argument” to go along with it… you and the rest of the readers of this blog are knowledgeable enough to see the obvious pattern.
I’ll agree that Republicans at the federal level have not been very effective in this area… and neither have Democrats. what i’m saying is that enacting TRULY conservative fiscal policies will do a better job of getting us to the goal of a balanced budget… and that chart clearly supports that idea.
Not to be a prat, but can I get that chart as a percentage of average annual income instead? And perhaps mapped to federal per capita spending.
My point is that while all politics is local, this shit isn’t taking place in a vacuum.
Sully: Again you seem to be confusing fiscal responsibility and a blanced budget with total expenditures. My point was, Maryland, liberal programs and all, has seen more fiscal responsibility under a Democrat’s leadership than a Republican’s.
Of course the chart needs an argument to go along with it. You’ve produced a chart that you claim provides correlation between red states and balanced budgets. But does it show this? What states have “conservative fiscal policies”? What does that mean? How strong is the correlation?
Not to mention the fact that correlation does not mean causation. Haven’t you seen pirates vs global temperature?
http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001857.php
You *must* provide an argument for why you believe the correlation you claim (I’m actually not even necessarily convinced there’s even a strong correlation, to be honest) or else it means absolutely nothing.
In fact, it appears if you actually look at the data:
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/02/17/budget-deficits-by-state/
Gee, what states are in the most trouble (states listed with two factors indicating their Redness or Blueness, most recent party preference for Governors followed by PVI):
Alaska (Red, Red)
California (Blue, Blue)
Arizona (Red, Red)
Nevada (Red, Red)
Kansas (Blue, Red)
New York (Blue, Blue)
New Jersey (Blue, Blue)
Rhode Island (Blue, Blue)
Illinois (Blue, Blue)
So yeah, there’s not really a very strong correlation at all between the states in the most trouble and whether they are Red or Blue. 3 Reds, 5 Blues, and a split (although it’s worth noting while Kansas has had Democratic Governors they are *very* Republican according to the PVI).
Oh, that list of states is in no particular order.
California’s governor, while nominally a Republican, governs as a Democrat.
Ha, perhaps so much so that I didn’t even think about it and wrote “Blue” for governor. 🙂
using the per capita debt data on the above-linked chart, along with 2009 per capita personal income (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104652.html), here are the rankings of states by per capita debt as a percentage of per capita personal income:
1) Nebraska (0.039%)
Wyoming
Iowa
South Dakota
North Dakota
Tennessee
Colorado
Arkansas
Montana
10) Texas (1.425%)
Indiana
New Hampshire
Oklahoma
Idaho
Vermont
Virginia
Maine
Missouri
Michigan
20) North Carolina (2.220%)
Arizona
Pennsylvania
Nevada
Alabama
Minnesota
Ohio
South Carolina
Florida
Kansas
30) Utah (3.100%)
Alaska
Georgia
Maryland
West Virginia
Louisiana
New Mexico
Illinois
Wisconsin
Mississippi
40) Rhode Island (5.187%)
Oregon
Kentucky
Washington
California
Delaware
New York
New Jersey
Connecticut
Massachusetts
50) Hawaii (9.512%)
i’d say those PVI rankings would line up fairly well with this list.
as for attaching federal per capita spending to the analysis, i don’t have the time to do that since every datasource i’ve seen shows different data based on their own criteria. i don’t think it’d be very relevent anyway since some states get more or less depending on current events (ie, LA & MI got a lot back in 2005-06 due to Katrina), defense spending (mostly in the south & mountain west), etc. for example, i saw a statistic that shows that wyoming gets back $1.11 for every dollar it sends to the feds, whereas california only gets back $0.78. however, when it comes to welfare per capita, wyoming gets less than $40 from the feds, whereas california gets more than $120.
Again, as a Brit, I need to point out to the locals that the Governor is the Executive, carrying out the budget(s) as passed by the Legislature …
With all due respect to our Governator, here, he gets to be executive to budgets passed by a legislature that *is* a poster-child for US-liberal (aka Projective Party) spending …
I, for one, would like to see Sully’s state-level-debt-per-capita with overlays for
a) Party controlling the legislature
b) Party of Governor
c) Both a) and b)
And, of course, I would *still* love to hear an explanation for why California is in the economic state it is in as compared to Texas … for state debt, tax rates, unemployment rates, GDP per capita, percentage state jobs, percentage private sector jobs, and other such indicators …
Sully #22 – any chance of you doign that,a gain, showing legislative tilt (blue or red) ?
I would predict most of the top ones to be red versus most of the bottom ones to be blue, but I don’t know … I would predict a very strong contrast between 1-10 versus 41-50 …
Jim: i don’t think tax code would be considered “expenditures.” i’m talking about both sides of the equation. somehow the poorest states with the lowest population density and lowest tax rates generally don’t have as much budget trouble as the richest states with the highest population density and highest tax rates. you’d think that the cost per capita (as a percentage of per capita income) for government and educational buildings, infrastructure, employees, etc would be higher in low density areas (ie, building roads, schools, etc around a state like montana would cost more per person because each building/road/employee would be allocated to fewer people than in high density states). you’d think they’d require a higher percentage of each person’s income in order to cover the costs in a low density & low income state.
to summarize:
– low tax rates on low income people to cover more “items” per person usually results in less budget trouble.
– high tax rates on high income people to cover fewer “items” per person usually results in more budget trouble in this country
please explain
sorry, meant so say “MS” in #22, not “MI”… don’t think Michican got hit very hard by Katrina
I can’t speak for any other state, not knowing the data and what not, but in the case of Washington state, with a democratic governor and democratic state legislature we were in the black for a number of years (debate was raging about what to do with the surplus) before the economic meltdown.
I would be interested in seeing the trends in the list Sully posted @22. I think that you’d find that states hit hardest by the economic meltdown would be further down the list.
@Alasdair:
“Again, as a Brit, I need to point out to the locals that the Governor is the Executive, carrying out the budget(s) as passed by the Legislature …”
Again, as a person with an IQ that takes 3 digits to display, I need to point out that the Governor isn’t just handed a budget and told to implement it by the Legislature, its a long process that involves significant input from him directly as well as the agencies he overseas. Only someone with an IQ that can be displayed on 1 digit would ignore the realities the budget process in order to try and score political points.
Incidentatly, you may not be aware of it, but de-regulation of California’s energy industry led to massive problems and not the magical improvements that conservatives so often champion.
@Sully: Re: 25 I think there are many other factors at work that you aren’t taking into account. For example, lower expenses. It costs more to build a building in New York or Texas than it does in Wyoming or Montana. It costs more to buy food or gas too. Lower density areas also have a lot more flexibility which can bring down costs. Where do you think its going to be more difficult to try and fix a road (and therefor cost more) downtown L.A. or Bozeman, Montana? Or build new roads. California highways for example, have to be sturdier to withstand earthquakes, often involve lots of elevated roadways and overpasses, which are far more difficult (and costly) to engineer than they are in the more open, less populated plain states. High density populations present unique challanges in many many areas. In addition if you have millions of people using a road each day versus thousands, you’ll see more wear and tear, more accidents, require more police, etc.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that lower density, lower population areas are cheaper to maintain. It’s exactly what I’d expect.
Here’s a listing of states ordered by PVI, followed by their 2010 gap as a percent of the general fund:
Utah: -21, 22.1%
Wyoming: -20, 1.8%
Idaho: -18, 22.4%
Oklahoma: -17, 28.4%
Nebraska: -14, 9.2%
Alabama: -14, 23.7%
Alaska: -13, 28.9%
Kansas: -12, 33.9%
Kentucky: -11, 14.5%
North Dakota: -10, (missing)
Mississippi: -9, 19.3%
Arkansas: -9, 9.1%
Louisiana: -9, 27.8%
South Dakota: -9, 4.3%
Texas: -8, 10.7%
West Virginia: -8, 8.2%
South Carolina: -8, 21.5%
Tennessee: -8, 12.1%
Montana: -7, (missing)
Georgia: -6, 28.8%
Indiana: -5, 10.6%
Arizona: -4, 65.0%
North Carolina: -4, 26.2%
Missouri: -3, 22.7%
Virginia: -2, 24.1%
Florida: 0, 28.5%
Ohio: 0, 13.9%
Colorado: 0, 23.8%
Iowa: 1, 22.6%
New Hampshire: 1, 28.6%
New Mexico: 2, 18.2%
Pennsylvania: 2, 23.6%
Nevada: 2, 46.8%
Minnesota: 3, 22.7%
Wisconsin: 3, 23.7%
Oregon: 4, 32.4%
Washington: 4, 27.9%
Michigan: 5, 15.8%
Maine: 6, 28.0%
Connecticut: 7, 27.0%
New Jersey: 7, 40.0%
Delaware: 7, 18.2%
California: 8, 52.8%
Illinois: 9, 43.7%
Maryland: 9, 20.3%
Rhode Island: 11, 34.8%
New York: 12, 38.8%
Massachusetts: 12, 20.4%
Vermont: 13, 28.3%
Hawaii: 13, 25.2%
I took the PVI data from wikipedia, set “even” as zero, and R+ as negative and D+ as positive. The 2010 budget gap data is from the cbpp.org site, table 3. If anyone would like to see the code I used to generate this, it’s pretty simple.
If we’re looking for patterns here I don’t see them. Both the best and worst states are red states. I don’t think most people realize how leveraged Arizona is.
ere are the rankings of states by per capita debt as a percentage of per capita personal income:
Huh? Why is that an effective measure of a states fiscal responsibility?
Oops, I just realized that in my first sampling where I said Nevada was Red, Red, it appears it’s Red, Blue (it has a D+2 PVI)
Most interesting:
average dem debt: 29.0818181818
median dem debt: 27.0
average rep debt: 20.6652173913
median rep debt: 27.8
So it appears there are a couple more egregious states on the dem side, but by and large there’s no difference.
David K #28 – I’m sorry that you apparently were teased about your obvious intelligence so much as a kid … that can be traumatic … still, you appear to be reasonably high-functioning …
Yes, in rational circumstances, the Governor and the Legislature work together … then, on the other hand, we have situations like the current California, or the US during most of Reagan’s 2 terms as US President …
Both of those both proved and continue to prove that the Legislature make the decisions – the Executive can Veto, but the Legislature can overturn any Executive Veto whenever it decides to do so … and then the Executive is stuck with the Legislature’s Budget …
So – it is disingenuous (aka DavidKian ‘thinking’) to pretend that the Executive can do more than persuade … to phrase it otherwise, the Executive proposes, and the Legislature disposes …
Oh – and you apparently have fallen for one of the more common propaganda pieces … “… but de-regulation of California’s energy industry led to massive problems …” …
IF California’s energy industry had been genuinely deregulated, such a claim might become plausible … the reality, however, is that only one side of it was de-regulated – and the other was left tightly-regulated … that, unfortunately, is a proven recipe for disaster …
Sully – #22 – your list updated to show your number, followed by Party in Control of Legislature, followed by Party of Governor
1) Nebraska (0.039%) – nonpartisan – GOP
Wyoming – GOP – Dem
Iowa – Dem – Dem
South Dakota – GOP – GOP
North Dakota – GOP – GOP
Tennessee – Split – Dem
Colorado – Dem – Dem
Arkansas – Dem – Dem
Montana – Dem – Dem
10) Texas (1.425%) – GOP – GOP
Indiana – Dem – GOP
New Hampshire – Dem – Dem
Oklahoma – GOP – Dem
Idaho – GOP – GOP
Vermont – Dem – GOP
Virginia – Split – GOP
Maine – Dem – Dem
Missouri – GOP – Dem
Michigan – Split – Dem
20) North Carolina (2.220%) – Dem – Dem
Arizona – GOP – GOP
Pennsylvania – Split – Dem
Nevada – Dem – GOP
Alabama – Dem – Rep
Minnesota – Dem – GOP
Ohio – Split – Dem
South Carolina – GOP – GOP
Florida – GOP – GOP (actually, this is Crist !)
Kansas – GOP – Dem
30) Utah (3.100%) GOP – GOP
Alaska – Split – GOP
Georgia – GOP – GOP
Maryland – Dem – Dem
West Virginia – Dem – Dem
Louisiana – Dem – GOP
New Mexico – Dem – Dem
Illinois – Dem – Dem
Wisconsin – Dem – Dem
Mississippi – Dem – GOP
40) Rhode Island (5.187%) – Dem – GOP
Oregon – Dem – Dem
Kentucky – Split – Dem
Washington – Dem – Dem
California – Dem – GOP (I know, our Governator !)
Delaware – Dem – Dem
New York – Dem – Dem
New Jersey – Dem – GOP (Christie – less than a year)
Connecticut – Dem – GOP
Massachusetts – Dem – Dem
50) Hawaii (9.512%) – Dem – GOP
Legislature Party Controlling taken from here …
Party of Governor taken from here …
So – how did my predictions do ?
Top 10 – 4 GOP, 4 Dem, 1 Split, 1 nonpartisan
2nd 10 – 3 GOP, 5 Dem, 2 Split
3rd 10 – 5 GOP, 4 Dem, 1 Split
4th 10 – 1 GOP, 8 Dem, 1 Split
Bottom 10 – 9 Dem, 1 Split …
So – in the bottom 20 – 1 GOP, 17 Dem, 2 Split …
And the single GOP is #32 – the 2 Splits are #31 and #42 …
The pattern sorta stands out, don’t it ?
Jim Kelly #33 …
2 sets of stats – 2,3,4,5,6 – and – 1, 2, 4, 8, 15 …
The first has average 4 and median 4 …
The second has average 6 and yet still has median 4 …
Which is why average usually is more meaningful than median …
ok, this is getting a bit out of hand… it’s taking multiple lengthy posts each time one of us gets a chance to respond. anyway, i’ll try to sufficiently respond with a few posts without eating up too much of my time.
David K #29 – i specifically touched on the whole “higher cost of living” aspect of state differences in the comment you were responding to. i’ll show some data that you can’t deny would mean that cost of roads (as one example) should cost less per person in CA than in MT.
CA population: 36,961,664
MT population: 974,989
CA miles of public roads: 169,793
MT miles of public roads: 69,450
sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/xls/hm10.xls
so, CA 37.9 times as many people and 2.4 times as many miles of public roads as MT. are you going to tell me that the statewide average cost to build and maintain roads is more than 15.5 times as high in CA? and in order to have equal effects on the budget, that multiple would be even higher since CA tax rates are higher, and they’re applied to an average income that’s about 25% higher than MT… so they’d have to cost more like 20+ times more in order to give CA a budgetary disadvantage vs MT with regard to roads. similar arguments can be made for schools, gov’t agencies, gov’t employees, etc.
Okay, this is actually deeply fascinating to me.
David, the reason I wanted to see debt as percentage of income is to control for the issues you cite, regarding it being more expensive for government to operate in certain areas. It is also more expensive to live there, making the per capita income higher. If you map how much the states are spending to how much the people that live there are making you get a better idea of if things are truly out of control. Not only that but it gives you a much better idea of their responsibility with regard to debt.
Though in fairness to the bottom ten, looking at that list, you mostly see states that were hit very hard by the economic crises, but that were doing reasonably well before it. Except for CA which has basically been in the ringer for the past decade.
I’m not sure what to glean from this other than that everyone seems to be acting irresponsibly, but that states with low costs of living seem to act, over all, more responsibly. Which honestly probably accounts for the low cost of living. Which doesn’t really tell us anything.
Alasdair: Here’s a cute website with cats and pretty colors that teach you about mean and median:
http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0001736.html
The median often better expresses the common-run, since it is not, as is the mean, affected by an excessively high or low figure.
Jim #31 – i’ll go ahead and assume you don’t think per capita debt isn’t a good measure of a state’s fiscal responsibility, which means you’re asking why adding the “as a percentage of per capita personal income” is helpful. first, dcl asked to see it. second, it pushes the statistics in YOUR FAVOR because blue states generally have higher average incomes than red states. third, it’s helpful because… well, let’s use an analogy. someone making $100K per year vs someone making $40K per year (& expecting that discrepancy to remain in the future)… both with $20K in debt… who’s in a worse debt situation?
Jim #30&33 – you keep going back to 2010 starting budget gaps. both parties are guilty of twisting initial budget figures, so i’m not dumping on the Dems here… but the point is that they’re just “plans.” why would you look at a single year’s budget plans rather than looking at what has actually HAPPENED over a period of years? perfect example is the healthcare bill… it had a “budget,” and then it has ACTUALS… and the actuals are (surprise surprise!) turning out not quite as deficit-friendly as the budget predicted. this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t care about how states (and the nation) do their budgets… it’s just that determining which set of policies is better would be best done using the data showing exactly what has happened over a longer period of time when using each of those policies.
Sully, in some cases it can cost several million dollars per mile to build a road in CA. I don’t know if this is because they are getting bilked, but I would guess MT roads tend to be in the hundreds of thousand dollars ball park per mile instead of the millions per mile ball park. So 20X might not be out of the question. (I’m of course talking about major new road construction.)
Let me suggest a thought experiment…..let’s compare you budget gap data to the number of illegal immigrants in the state……
Sully, at 40… Pretty much exactly. In regards to the response to # 31.
Also, actually in re 30&33 you have a good point also.
Or as use to upset my father deeply, the company he worked for set bonuses based on what you billed not what you actually got paid by clients. Shockingly the company ran into some financial trouble and decided just looking at billings wasn’t such a hot idea.
Sully: No, I don’t think it’s a good measure of a state’s fiscal responsibility. It might be a way to measure their capacity to resolve the problem, but it tells me nothing objective about how badly they over spent in the first place to get into it. The objective measure is debt/general fund.
If you’d like I can rerun the numbers tonight with the 2009 actuals that the site had, but I don’t expect them to be much different. The point is, taking your run of mill red state and your run of the mill blue state you are going to see roughly the same amount of debt.
The real issue here is that you clearly seem to be trying to fit the data to your preconceived notions of what is right and wrong. When it isn’t fitting your preconceived notion, you move the goal posts to more irrelevant measures by attempting to include income, etc. Then you have Gahrie who wants to compare to them thar illegals that took our jerbs, all in the name of attempting to find correlation, again, without any attempt to support the case for causation.
I’m no statistician but this thread is a train wreck. (That’s including my own work, but my own work wasn’t attempting to support a case, rather to refute it).
regarding this mean/median thing, why not throw a weighted average in there? i mean, if you want to see means and medians, here are a couple more sets based on Jim’s data in #30:
mean budget gap:
top 10 most “red” states (excl ND): 20.4%
top 10 most “blue” states: 32.3%
all 23 “red” states (excl ND & MT): 19.0%
all 22 “blue” states: 29.1%
median budget gap:
top 10 most “red” states (excl ND): 22.3%
top 10 most “blue” states: 31.6%
all 23 “red” states (excl ND & MT): 22.1%
all 22 “blue” states: 27.5%
once again looks statistically significant.
as for a weighted average, there are several different possible ways to do it. one purpose for doing it would be to show how much the more or less “extreme” states are skewing each side’s figures. ie, are the states that are closer to center (and therefore in theory would either have a less conservative set of policies, or perhaps some liberal policies mixed in) throwing things off for the states that have more purely conservative or liberal policies.
the following figures are weighted average budget gaps of the red and blue states (weighted by how “blue” or “red” they are based on PVI):
red states: 17.91%
blue states: 30.07%
based on the differences in the means and medians at the top, along with these weighted averages, it looks like the more moderate red states bring their overall average gap UP, and the more moderage blue states bring their overall average down… once again leaning in favor of conservative policies.
The reason you can’t do that is because we’re playing with a pretty loose metric, PVI. In fact there’s no “simple” metric to label states as red or blue. But at any rate, if we keep the scope wide, it likely covers up the weakness of the metric. When you drill down, however, errors in our use of PVI as a model mean more. Likewise with any other metric.
For example, Nevada is listed as a blue state by PVI and “split” by Alasdair’s compiling of legislature and governor, yet it’s general considered to be relatively fiscally conservative (Mercatus has them tied for 11th for “fiscal freedom” and they have some of the most attractive business tax policies in the country) yet they have one of the highest debt as percentage of the general fund numbers.
So this is my point. You guys are grasping at straws.
Further…
once again leaning in favor of conservative policies.
But what were those policies? You have no idea. You are manipulating numbers to paint a picture without context.
err, meant to close the tag after your quote there.
dcl #41 – even if the 20x might not be far from the truth for roads “in some cases” in CA, we’re talking statewide average… because the state budget is used for roads all across the state, not just downtown LA vs rural MT. CA certainly has many long roads without curbs and overpasses similar to those in MT, and the cost of those would significantly drag down the average. i’d guess that the statewide average cost per mile isn’t even 8x that of MT.
hen you have Gahrie who wants to compare to them thar illegals that took our jerbs
1) I never mentioned jobs.
2) Are you seriously claiming that illegal immigrants have no impact on a State’s budget?
gahrei, #50, Of course not, they pay taxes.
Besides, if people were serious about solving the illegal problem they would, and not the way Arizona is going about it. But business doesn’t really want to solve the problem because to them it isn’t a problem. They keep wages low, especially in certain sectors of the economy. Particularly those jobs that are unpleasant to perform and don’t pay well.
The problem with trying to map who is fiscally responsible, Republicans or Democrats is that it is very difficult to control all the possible variables, so the stats are easy to manipulate. Both politics and budgets take place over time. What it means to be a Democrat or a Republican if different states is, well, different. All of this is very localized stuff, with a lot of caveats.
I’m not saying it is impossible to generalize, but it is certainly quite difficult. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but not one that is likely to change, significantly, a lot of opinions.
Hell, in Maryland, they had a Governor Robert Ehrlich run a muck and make a disaster out of the Maryland budget, who was replaced by Governor Martin O’Malley who saw Ehrlich’s chickens come home to roost, and has spent most of his term trying to fixe the problems Ehrlich caused, and is now put in the position of defending himself against an Ehrlich campaign that’s attempting to paint O’Malley as fiscally irresponsible.
Or take the case of Virginia, where 8 years of democrats, Warner and Kaine (Kane wasn’t the best of governors, but at least he was responsible) who got the State on reasonably solid fiscal footing. Making both significant budget cuts and raising taxes to do it. They’ve recently been replaced by a Republican, McDonnell, who is deftly trying to destroy what they did. But VA still shows up in the top half and the plus column for the Republicans, even though they had nothing to do with the present fiscal condition of the state. Maryland shows up in the bottom half and as a minus for the Dems, even though the issues were caused by the Republicans.
This is a much more complicated metric to judge on than the simple assertions we might be trying to make. There are a lot of trend lines involved. And probably different state by state.
gahrei, #50, Of course not, they pay taxes.
I assume this was a joke…..
@dcl, #51: precisely, well said.
@gahrie: No, it’s not:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24054024/
@Sully – You are assuming a lot in comparing miles to miles in regards to roads. A mile of road in Montana vs. a mile of road in California is not necessarilly going to be the same thing. And as you point out, yes not all roads in California are free way overpasses in downtown L.A., but then how much of the budget do those vastly more complex types of roads account for? Maybe they represent 10% of the roads from a miles standpoint but account for 50% of the budget due to width, complexity, useage, etc.
@Jim Kelly
Don’t try and confuse gahrie with facts and logic, its just not nice 🙂
dcl #51 – an interestingly disingenous comment … “” – except for the FACT that those responsible for the budget in Virginia – their House of Delegates – has been GOP-controlled since 2000 … (from here) …
So – while Kane and Warner may well have had input tot he Virginia Budget, unless you can show me that, in Virginia, the Legilature doesn’t control the budget but the Governor does, you just substantiated that their GOP legislature does responsible budgets …
Jim Kelly #46 – Nevada isn’t split – the legislature is Dem-controlled … the most that a GOP Governor can do is try to moderate excesses … (unless he is way smarter than his legislature – cf Pawlenty, Tim) …
David K #54 – ummm what “issues” were caused by GOP in Maryland – a State with Dem legislature and Dem Governor ?
you’re missing the point. my comparison doesn’t make any detailed assumptions… just some very safe basic assumptions that would make the result err in your favor if anything. but ok, let’s go along with your extreme hypothetical… i’m not completely familiar with CA, but i think these assumptions are going way beyond the point of being “safe.” let’s assume that there are so super-expensive roads in CA (20x the cost of an average MT road), and that these roads do somehow make up 50% of the budget. basic mathematical concepts will tell you that the rest of the roads, many of which would be similar to MT roads costing less than twice as much, would drag the average cost down to well below the 20x. i haven’t even touched on the fact that there are some aspects of road-building/maintenance in MT that would cost more than in CA, such as the cost of getting the equipment, materials, and people to the worksite… things are much further spread out and take much more time and energy to get to your average road-building/maintenance project. but i’m fine with ignoring things like that, just to make my assumptions that much safer.
how about CT… taking incomes and tax rates out of the equation and using figures from the same source as previously, the cost of roads in CT would have to be more than 12x as high as MT… and instead of the average income being 25% higher, it’s about 60% higher, with tax rates even higher as well… so are you saying CT roads might be at least 20x more expensive per mile than MT roads? trust me, there aren’t many areas of CT where highways would get super-expensive.
but again, the point is that cost per capita for many aspects of a state budget will be much lower in high density states than in low density states if each state is providing to an equally sufficient standard.
just one more example because i can’t afford to spend this much time on this stuff. according to the 2008 census data shown on website linked below, CA had 2,256,634 state/local employees and paid them a total of a little over $10 billion per month. MT had 79,153 state/local employees and paid them just under $181 million per month. ok, so CA had 28.5 times as many employees as MT… showing that, like i stated, MT has more government employees per capita… and i don’t think the reason is because MT is more guilty of a “big government” mindset than CA. however, the bigger statistic comes to the salary comparison. 28.5 times as many employees, and they’re paid more than 55 times as much as MT employees… so the average salary for a state/local employee in CA is about twice the average in MT. this is compared to an average statewide average income difference of about 25%. overpaid much? and if you’re thinking there’s a part-time/full-time employee discrepancy that’s causing it, be assured that the multiple goes up to more than 56 when just using FT employees.
http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/California_state_government_salary
http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Montana_state_government_salary
you can claim these statistics are cherry-picked, but we keep seeing the same patterns when using data provided by both sides of this conversation.
Alasdair, except for the the fact that the Virginia house of delegates dragged their heals, pissed, moaned, complained and bitched every step of the way to fiscal responsibility. They basically had to have it rammed down their throats.
I brought up Maryland, Ehrlich was and is a Republican, despite his website’s efforts to completely ignore that fact. So too his Facebook page. And was responsible for pushing through much of what is presently causing problems in fiscal responsibility area.
No, I don’t think anyone is arguing that CA has been well run since the mid to early 70s.
Basically, the shit show in CA started with the Sainted Ronald Reagan. The conception that Government is the problem and taxes are the enemy true or not has been slowly eroding fiscal responsibility in CA and the rest of the US for decades.
And the Republicans basically have been running on bribery ever sense.
Because everyone wants whatever service or feature of Government they want but don’t really want to pay for anything. And the Republicans have been telling people that this is okay.
#60 Bullshit.
The problem in California is not that taxes aren’t high enough, it is the fact that spending is out of control.
The problem is that it is both, but everyone cries into their milk whenever anyone attempts to solve either or both problems. You have literally decades of head in the behavior. The disaster in CA we are seeing to day could be seen for the 1980s.
Though, seriously, how is spending “out of control”. As far as I know CA is trying to repair infrastructure that is failing, teach kids stuff, and otherwise to the sort of Basic shit state government tries to do.
@Alasdair – I have no idea what happened in Maryland, ask dcl, thats his area.
“you can claim these statistics are cherry-picked, but we keep seeing the same patterns when using data provided by both sides of this conversation.”
So you are using multiple sets of cherry picked data to draw conclusions while ignoring all external factors that might attribute the difference between pay and cost in the state of California and the state of Montana?
But as they and Schwarzenegger soon discovered, most of California’s government machinery remained union-controlled—especially the Democratic state legislature, which blocked long-term reform. Frustrated, Schwarzenegger backed a series of 2005 initiatives sponsored by taxpayer groups to curb the unions and restrain government growth, including one that made it harder for public-employee unions to use members’ dues for political purposes. The controversial proposals sparked the most expensive statewide election in American history. Advocacy groups and businesses spent a staggering $300 million (some of it, however, coming from drug companies trying to head off an unrelated initiative). The spending spree included $57 million from the CTA, which mortgaged its Sacramento headquarters for the cause. All of the initiatives went down to defeat.
California taxpayers nevertheless received a brief respite, thanks to the mid-decade housing boom that drove the economy and tax collections higher and momentarily eased the state’s budget crisis. Predictably, state politicians forgot California’s Davis-era deficit woes and gobbled up the surpluses, increasing spending by 32 percent, or $34 billion, in four years. Then the housing market crashed in 2007, prompting a cascade of budget crises in Sacramento and around the state. Only too late have Californians recognized the true magnitude of their fiscal problems, including a $21 billion deficit by mid-2009 that forced the state to issue IOUs when it temporarily ran out of cash. In the municipal bond market, fears are rising that the Golden State could actually default on its debt.
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_california-unions.html
I don’t recall ever saying CA was not in deep crap or badly managed. But yes, let’s blame it on paying people a livable wage. There are a lot if issues, pretending that irresponsible tax cuts are not part of the problem is disingenuous at best.
Also, sorry for the surfet of typos today, I’m way too sleep deprived to proof read properly…
@Alasdair, #56: I live in Maryland, and I can tell you that Ehlrich has simply not been as fiscally responsible as O’Malley.
As far as your comment about Nevada, I’m just going by what you wrote in your list. Although you are being ridiculous with this “it’s all about the legislature” effort as far as budgets go. So are we to believe that Christie in Jersey is a dope and it’s the New Jersey state legislature finally getting their act together to cut the budget? I’d wager you’d be willing to make an exception to your beliefs when the roles are reversed.
Either way, I’d welcome Nevada being labeled a bluer government, it just furthers my argument that once you start shrinking your sample size the weirdness from crap like this (Nevada having conservative fiscal policies but being a bluer government) becomes more of a problem.
@Sully: you can claim these statistics are cherry-picked, but we keep seeing the same patterns when using data provided by both sides of this conversation.
I can and am claiming that, and no we aren’t seeing that pattern, except when your side selects the data. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
And I’m sure, for instance, that in your mind the fact that Arizona is in the absolute worst shape of any state in the union, actually eking out the great state of California, is due to the fact that they had a Democrat for a governor for 1 and a half terms, and we’ll ignore that they’re pretty high as far as fiscal policy and regulatory policy freedoms according to Mercatus, that the state legislature is heavily Republican. It’s gotta be the term and a half governor that did it.
But hey, in Maryland if we have a one term Republican Governor and similar fiscal freedom rankings, it’s gotta be the evil Dems in the state house!
There are so many examples of how tortured your attempt to use these numbers are it’s ridiculous.
Just come out and admit it, there’s no evidence to support your claim.
I moved to Maryland in the middle of the Ehrlich years, so I don’t have the expertise here. But it struck me how many times the Maryland State House of Delegates overrode Ehrlich’s vetoes. So you can’t blame it all on him. In fact, without legislative support, I think most pols end up passing short sighted laws – after all, those tend to be popular, and the one thing politicians agree on is that they want to be reelected. Thus, hard measures are never attempted, because blame would be assigned, and we can’t have that!
we’re only seeing patterns when using our data? are u serious? so i take it that you completely ignored my comment at #45. that was based on data YOU provided. and don’t say that i picked my own metric based on your data because i used mean and median, just like you in #33. however, we got different outcomes for 2 reasons.
first, our avg blue state gap matched up, but our avg red state gap did not… this is because i divided the total by 25 (total # of red states) rather than by 23 since ND & MT were excluded. so the means are as follows:
mean budget gap:
top 10 most “red” states (excl ND): 20.42%
top 10 most “blue” states: 32.25%
all 23 “red” states (ND & MT excluded): 20.67%
all 22 “blue” states: 29.08%
for medians on the other hand, our figures were drastically different, and i just realized that it’s because you either intentionally invented your own way of calculating a median or you just don’t know how. it looks like you just took the gap of the state with the median PVI on each side (except that instead of averaging the 2 datapoints on either side of the centerline to get the median for blue states, you just took the lower one at 27%). the real way to calculate the median gap would be to order them by gap and then take the middle. so instead of each side having similar medians as determined by you, here’s the actual median data:
median budget gap:
top 10 most “red” states (excl ND): 22.25%
top 10 most “blue” states: 31.55%
all 23 “red” states (excl ND & MT): 22.10%
all 22 “blue” states: 27.45%
so as i stated originally, and based on data YOU provided, and using YOUR metric, we see a pattern. funny how that works, isn’t it. the ony metric you’ve found that goes against these patterns is the fact that AZ has the highest 2010 initial budget gap. that, my friend, is not called a pattern… and nor is it called a pattern-buster. it’s called an anomaly.
just admit it… there are patterns. at least dcl, although he might disagree with the conclusion that i say they support, seems to recognize the patterns, accepts them as reasonable metrics, and is intrigued by them. these facts are not meaningless cherry-picked ones. it’s reasonable for you to claim that these facts don’t PROVE our theory (i don’t claim that either), but it’s not reasonable to just dismiss the facts because you don’t like what they suggest.
No, you are using a selected subset of my data that conveniently fits your world view.
And no, I’ve clearly found several things that go against this. I’ve specifically discussed the problems with the analysis in the cases of Arizona, Nevada and Maryland. Do you think these are the only cases where, once examined, your cursory glance breaks down?
That’s my problem with your line of reasoning, and has been since the beginning. Or rather, it’s your lack of reasoning. You have some numbers, which you’ve selected a specific subset of (because of course you dismiss my numbers because they don’t agree with you) that show what you want to show, and then you point at them and say, “ah ha! look! proof!”
And yet you’ve made no analysis whatsoever.
I could just as easily find some other metric that they all have in common, and then attribute it to that. You seem to be missing that even if you can find correlation, which you haven’t, you haven’t shown causation. Nor have you even attempted to.
Let’s take at face value your numbers in #70. So what have you “shown.” Red states are, on the average, screwed, but a little less screwed than blue states? Really?
You do no analysis of root causes. We’re supposed to what, assume this is because of their politics? As has been mentioned before in this thread, have you noticed the high correlation between states with high foreclosure rates and states with high budget gaps? Gee. Crazy how that works.
But I see how it works. Every one of the multiple things that destroy your “pattern” are anomalies. Got it.
According to Moody’s, the average state per capita debt of the 28 Obama states is $1,728 while the average debt in the 22 McCain states is less than half, at $749.
http://chuckdevore.com/2010/08/something-for-nothing-state-debt-and-the-2008-presidential-vote/