Posted on 12/26/2005 8:24:26 PM PST by george76
He couldn't believe that you could leave Hartford, CT, go north through Massachusetts, then through a little bit of New Hampshire (Seabrook), and on into Kittery, Maine. Four states in less than three hours :-)
Well if you want to drive through without stopping to see any of the sites, I guess you could cover New England {but still not all of it} in a full day.
Continue the Mass Exodus, those conservatives left should relocate to one of the smaller states in the Northeast or to a battleground state. They could drop from 16 to 8 seats in 90 years, amazing.
Massachusetts supports homo marriage, The Kennedy's and John Kerry, 10 House Dems, a Dem Legislature, terrorists, high taxes, big gov't, crazy Universities that I would never send my kids to, move out thru April 2010, after they lose 2 more seats then move back when it is too late for them to get them back for 10 years.
The trend will undoubtedly continue due to the baby gap between Red and Blue. I don't know about 10 seats, but there does not seem to be a whole lot that would stop such a trend from continuing.
The fact that the south is picking up political influence is the least of their worries. I fully expect them to start mounting calls for modifying or abolishing the electoral college.
They're missing the big story here, of course. The real story is not the population decline but the aging of the remaining population. That alone will give them nightmares, and even if they rewire the electoral college they will still be losing House seats, and we all know that it is the House that holds the purse strings. Their only end-run would be to get a President friendly to their interests to perpetually declare blue states disaster areas to secure temporary funding boosts there.
Poly-tics': noun< many blood sucking insects.
We need to find an activist judge who can find a constitutional penumbra requiring Massachusetts to give up two Senate seats instead.
How long before some dem congressman proposes legistlation to alter how the number is determined? They will show the supposed financial devistation that losing a congress member will cause to the state in order to push through some rule change and then the president will sign it so as to not cause problems.
The founding fathers did not create this Senate, politicians did.
Originally, Senators represented the States interest. They were suppose to be the balance to the "people's" house.
In the early 1900s it was changed so Senators were elected by the population, and it has been down hill since.
I don't think it's the liberals that are leaving Mass. It is obviously the Conservitives leaving. This is happening for the same reason I am seriously considering leaving Illinois. Right now Indiana is looking really good.
Georgia actually has slightly higher taxes as a percentage of income than Massachusetts does. I know that this makes Georgia (and North Carolina) a bit atypical for the South. Massachusetts taxes are also in the middle of the pack, and my income is commensurate with the cost of living, so in most of the rest of the country I can visit and live like a king.
I love northern weather and northern cities. I don't enjoy January in Boston, but I do love July and August here, and I couldn't say the same for the south, so it's a tradeoff.
The people who are leaving are a) retirees moving to the South and b) people in their 30s who are done having fun in Boston, want to be able to buy a house where they can raise kids, and can't afford a shack anywhere within 20 miles of the city with our crazy real estate values. Combine that with a low birthrate and you have relative population decline.
Perhaps they should put a wall around it to keep people in.
And top it with razor wire.
And guard it with dogs and military police.
Kinda like in other communist countries.
Our economy is very strong--that's why real estate prices are so high. The reason our population is declining is because we're a victim of our own success, and people who want to raise kids can't afford to stay, as much as they'd like to. The only people I know who can live comfortably in Massachusetts are a) rich professionals with zero or one kid and b) people like me who are middle class but were lucky enough to get into the housing market before 2001. b) does grandfather in a lot of people, but not many under age 35.
So Boston is building housing like crazy, and the city's population is still declining, because families of 5 are leaving their apartments to move to North Carolina, Florida, or New Hampshire, and are replaced by a gay couple or a Carrie Bradshaw wannabe who buys it after it goes condo.
The people who moved to NH are more likely to vote Republican than those who lived there before. It's a bit of a paradox based on New Hampshire's history, but the long-term residents have been abandoning the GOP steadily while the "Massholes" are professionals with kids who are doing just fine economically and don't need the government's help. The commuter belt in southern N.H. is turning into one of the most reliably Republican parts of the state.
The people I know who have left are generally socially liberal, but can stand on their own two feet economically and don't look to the government for help.
I think they'll have a hard time mixing with some of the conservatives in the South who are socially conservative and like bringing home the bacon from Washington with other states' cash.
There's no way that Massachusetts could lose 2 seats in 2010. Similarly, there's almost no way Massachusetts could have avoided losing a seat in 2010, even if we'd been growing as fast as New Hampshire. These trends are pretty hard to move as far as representation goes and the die was cast when Massachusetts managed to keep all its seats in 2000 for the first time since like 1950.
As I said.
Ever seen Californias map? The entire coastal sections, are Democrat and the "Hicks" in the Sierra Nevada and Valley's are represented by Republicans. Although it is true, the map represents the liberal and democrat leanings of the state, it is not at all representative of the voting habits of those areas.
According to this link, Mass is rated # 4 (1 being the highest) in combined state and local rate.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/ba1cd4ffcc0ca07eb799766b52180919.swf
Georgia is rated # 26. Does Mass have high property tax? I pay about $2500 per year for a 220K home.
That's not state and local--that's #4 state and FEDERAL combined. Big difference, it's because our median incomes are so high that we pay a lot more in progressive federal income taxes than people in other states. Note for state taxes alone, we're #32, below Georgia.
Our property taxes are low because we do have the income tax, much of which gets funneled back to the towns. I pay $3700 a year for a two-family house worth about $600k and appraised by the town at about $500k.
Measured as a share of per capita income, Massachusetts residents pay less in taxes than people in North Carolina, Georgia, and about 20 other states. We can do that because we have relatively fewer kids to educate, relatively fewer poor people and uninsured to pay medical care for, and because our incomes are higher so with lower tax rates we can get the same amount of state revenue. 15 years of Republican governors have been good for us.
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