I'll bet most people don't realize how appropriate the label "Red state" really is. Though one usually pictures the denizen of a Red state as a gun-toting fag-hating Capitalist cowboy, it turns out that only 75% of that stereotype is accurate...rather than living up to the Capitalist ideals they claim to cherish, the Red states are actually redder than Communist tomatoes. (Though that's not really a good bit of imagry, because Communist tomatoes would be devoured by the starving proletariat masses long before they could ripen into redness.)

Red states tend to be the states that benefit most from our federal tax/aid system, becoming the "winners" in our wealth-redistribution lottery. For instance, states that voted for Al Gore in the 2000 election received an average of $0.87 for every dollar they paid in Federal taxes in fiscal 2002, while states that voted for Bush received an average of $1.12. Interestingly, the two closest states in the 2000 election (Florida and Oregon) each received an even $1.00. In the 2000 election, 76% percent of the "winning" states went to Bush, with 17 of the top 20 winners voting for Dubya. The "loser" states were predominantly Blue, supporting the Anybody But The Chimp ticket. Granted, the District of Columbia is a solid Blue state that is the biggest "winner" of them all--with around $6.00 in for every dollar out--but I think we can all see why DC might be a special case.

So it seems that the Red states should really be counting their blessings that those godless baby-eating liberals are also pinkos, because only pinkos would be okay with footing the bill for the failed economies and third-world social service SNAFUs of Red America. Small wonder that the neo-con movement is quickly leaving behind the philosophy of fiscal responsibility their party once campaigned upon; they are the ones reaping the greatest rewards for irresponsibility, and they know that the foolish Commies of the liberal Northeast will pick up the tab.

Republicans also seem to be surprisingly inept in the very areas that popular lore tells us are their strong points. If you look at statistics from the last 60 years, the averages for unemployment, GDP growth, and inflation under Democratic presidents are significantly healthier than the averages for those indicators under Republican presidents. Contrary to "Spend-o-crat" myth, the average increase in Federal spending is higher for the Republican presidents than for the Democratic CICs, and the average yearly deficit increases are higher under Republican presidents. The proverbial buck doesn't stop with the President, either; recent numbers on the state level show that state legislatures controlled by Republicans increased spending an average of 6.54% per year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17% for legislatures run by Democrats. Even the average number of new Federal employees is higher for Republicans than for Democrats, which seems odd when one considers that conservatives supposedly favor smaller government.

What I find especially funny is that the word "liberal" is used as a smear against the very sort of fiscal irresponsibility that the neo-cons are practicing, while a classic liberal is far more fiscally conservative than the GOP has been in decades.