When our Founding Fathers put together the Constitution, they envisioned that the states would act as policy laboratories–that when one state enacted a policy that worked, the other states would copy that policy. That is a great idea, but unfortunately egos, lust for power, and other things interfere with that basic idea.
On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article illustrating the differences in the outcomes of some of the economic policies various states have chosen.
The article reports:
President Joe Biden last week bragged that his economic policies — straight from the Democrats blueprint that says “borrow, tax, spend, regulate, then do it all again” — are working. But as we’ve noted, Bidenomics has been a wreck, a flop that is taking us into a recession.
Not only did Biden openly boast as our sclerosis grows worse, he also, as Democrats always do, took a jab at “trickle-down economics,” claiming it has “failed the middle class … failed America … blew up the deficit” and “increased inequity.”
…We don’t see Biden or any other Democrat ever coming around to supply-side economic policies, the correct terminology for what they sneeringly call “trickle-down economics,” which asserts that lower taxes and less regulatory meddling fuel economic growth. Yet they are exactly what our economy — any economy – needs, now and forever.
In our post-lockdown world, the states that have the strongest economic recoveries are the red ones on the map. And what do they have in common? Low taxes and light regulation.
We can see this vividly in the rankings of states that have had the greatest increases in hiring over the last year. Of the top 10, only two are blue, or Democratic, states.
(The Washington Post marks Georgia, fourth on the list, as one of three blue states because Biden took its 16 electoral votes, but that is misleading [intentionally, we’re sure] because it is a red state with large Republican majorities in both chambers of the legislature and a popular [53% of the vote in 2022] GOP governor. Nevada, next at fifth, is also considered blue even though it too has a GOP governor.)
The next seven states, according to the Post, are also red or Trump states and they tend to “have unusually low tax rates and lean on extractive industries such as mining or petroleum. We’ve seen firsthand the economic boom that gas and pipelines can bring to struggling regions.”
The article also notes:
“Heavily taxed blue states such as New York and California,” the Free Beacon continues, “last year had some of the country’s most drastic drops in tax revenue. At the same time, Republican states are enjoying the highest revenue increases even as they keep income taxes low.”
All I ask is that when people who have the sense to get out of blue states and move to red states move is that they don’t bring their blue state policies with them!