The Confederacy of Takers: Secede! Leave already you Red State/GOP welfare queens.
http://www.arkcity.net/opinion/columns/article_5f3f0a98-337f-11e2-a95f-001a4bcf887a.html
The Confederacy of Takers: Secede!
Posted: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 8:01 pm
By DANA MILBANK
President Barack Obama’s opponents have unwittingly come up with a brilliant plan to avoid the “fiscal cliff.”
They want to secede from the union.
If Obama is serious about being a good steward of the nation’s finances, he’d let them.
The White House, in one of those astro-turf efforts that make people feel warm about small-D democracy, launched a “We the People” program on its website last year, allowing Americans to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
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It would be excellent financial news for those of us left behind if Obama were to grant a number of the rebel states their wish “to withdraw from the United States and create (their) own NEW government” (the petitions emphasize “new” by capitalizing it).
Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes.
The balance is the opposite in blue states.
The secession petitions, therefore, give the opportunity to create what would be, in a fiscal sense, a far more perfect union.
Among those states with large numbers of petitioners asking out:
Louisiana (more than 28,000 signatures at midday Nov. 13), which gets about $1.45 in federal largess for every $1 it pays in taxes;
Alabama (more than 20,000 signatures), which takes $1.71 for every $1 it puts in;
South Carolina (26,000), which takes $1.38 for its dollar;
and Missouri (22,000), which takes $1.29 for its dollar.
To be fair, White House officials could refuse the secession petitions of states Obama won, such as New York (which receives only 79 cents on its tax dollar), Michigan (85 cents) and Colorado (79 cents).
What would be left is a Confederacy of Takers, including relatively poor states such as Alaska, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia.
—->Continued