Perhaps I spend too much time lurking around left-leaning blogs, but there are many myths taken as fact without any additional analysis.
One of the most prominent? The notion that red states take the most aid from the government.
...liberal economist Paul Krugman blogged that “Aaron Carroll of Indiana University tells us that in 2010, residents of the 10 states Gallup ranks as ‘most conservative’ received 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers, while the number for the most liberal states was only 17.1 percent.”
...But as solid as the statistics Krugman provided might seem, we’re left with one glaring problem: States aren’t people. Could it be possible that liberals within conservative states are the ones taking the welfare dollars?
A ◼ survey by the ◼ Maxwell Poll on the political affiliation of those receiving government aid showed this to be the case.
Type of Benefit Received - % Voting Dem - - - % Voting RepAttributing the problem to red states is false; the problem lies in the blue parts of the red states.
Public Housing.......................81%.......................12%
Medicaid................................74%.......................16%
Food Stamps..........................67%.......................20%
Unemployment Compensation..66%.......................21%
Disability (from Govt.)..............64%.......................25%
Welfare/Public Assistance........63%.......................22%
◼ Next time the media says “red states” are the poorest, remember this - Matt Palumbo/Rare
Paul Krugman and the left would like us to believe that red states are the poorest states.
PolitiFact rated such a claim as “true” noting, “The Census data also show that 9 of the 10 states with the lowest median household income were Red: Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oklahoma.” Whether or not a state is red or blue is based off how they voted in the 2012 election.
In another case of how sloppy PolitiFact’s “fact checking” can be, they didn’t even take cost of living differences into account when determining which states were the poorest.
Or that half of those “red” states have Democratic Governors....MORE, AT THE LINK.
◼ Krugman reports no individual level data, so let me. - Tino Sanandaji/A Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics/Super Economy
The Maxwell Poll has detailed information about welfare use....Hardly surprising, we see that in a two-party split, 60-80% of welfare recipients are Democrats, while full time Workers are evenly divided between parties.
◼ (S)imilar results in this recent NPR-Poll.Among the Long Term Unemployed, 72% of the two-party support goes to Democrats.
