Issues & Insights recently posted an article comparing how the blue and red states and cities have handled the COVID pandemic. We need to learn from the mistakes made.
The article reports:
…Those that hewed to the Red State model of lower taxes, less regulation, and respect for the rule of law thrived – while those that followed the “woke” blue-state model, built on socialist top-down control, forced equality, and divisive racial identity politics, suffered.
One of the new studies, by Phil Kerpen of The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, and published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ranked states by how they performed in three major areas during the pandemic: economics, education, and mortality.
That study, for good reason, has garnered much attention. It shows that red states, in general, beat blue states hands down during the pandemic, largely due to the latter’s dedication to damaging COVID lockdowns.
“Shutting down their economies and schools was by far the biggest mistake governors and state officials made during COVID, particularly in blue states,” said Moore, a co-founder of the Committee To Unleash Prosperity.
New Jersey was the worst-performing state, while neighboring blue-state giant New York was next, ranked 49th. Also flunking out were California, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.
“They had high age-adjusted death rates, they had high unemployment and significant GDP losses, and they kept their schools shut down much longer than almost all other states,” according to the study.
So who did best? Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota – and Florida.
Meanwhile, a second study from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that there has been massive population movement away from large blue-state cities toward red-state cities.
The article concludes:
As for New York, its leaders seem to think crime-ridden streets and more government spending will do the trick. Sorry, but New York’s losing its wealthiest citizens after years of misrule.
Far-left Democrats have an iron lock on government in Albany, so tax cuts and a crackdown on crime seems highly unlikely. In the meantime, one key group is leaving the state and city of New York in droves: Millionaires.
“New York’s share of the nation’s total millionaire earner population dropped to 9.9%, down from 12.7% as of 2010, the year after the state enacted a supposedly temporary and ultimately permanent higher rate on millionaire earners,” noted E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy think tank.
Good riddance you say? Millionaires pay 40% of taxes in New York. So losing so many to Florida, Texas and other red states is a disaster. All New York will suffer.
Truth is, America is being re-made, moving van by moving van, family by family, as the states’ demographic profiles and political leanings undergo dramatic shifts. It all points to a possible shift in political power toward conservative-leaning red states and away from once-dominant blue states. But how big that shift is remains to be seen.
As we’ve said before, the red-state model works. It has proved itself in good times and bad. Americans, you do have a choice: Red pill, or blue pill. Which is it going to be?
Our government was designed to give individual states the power to experiment with ideas to see what worked and what did not. The idea was that less successful states would copy what the successful states did. Unfortunately in our highly politically-charged atmosphere of today, blue states are not interested in learning from red states. Hopefully they will change their ways as their populations relocate.
