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Posted on 06/15/2024 9:24:15 PM PDT by Cronos
As Democrats make their case to voters around the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the bluest parts of the country — cities on the West Coast — are a mess.
Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?
I’ll try to answer that question in a moment, but liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle.
...the truth is that too often we offer a version of progressivism that doesn’t result in progress. ...Democratic states enjoy a life expectancy two years longer than Republican states. Per capita G.D.P. in Democratic states is 29 percent higher than in G.O.P. states, and child poverty is lower. Education is generally better in blue states, with more kids graduating from high school and college. The gulf in well-being between blue states and red states is growing wider, not narrower.
So my rejoinder to Republican critiques is: Yes, governance is flawed in some blue parts of America, but overall, liberal places have enjoyed faster economic growth and higher living standards than conservative places. That doesn’t look like failure.
So the problem isn’t with liberalism. It’s with West Coast liberalism.
...the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.
...Maybe a healthy Republican Party keeps the Democratic Party healthy, and vice versa.
Without opposition party oversight, problems aren’t always fixed expeditiously.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“I’m too lazy and do not care enough but highly doubt the life expectancy in blue states is 2yrs longer comparing apples to apples.”
I don’t know about that.
There’s a lot of people who are obesely overweight and smokers in my red state of Tennessee.
I’m talking about young people who should be in the prime of life who are waddling through malls with their equally morbese children with double chins.
When I was young we worked or played
outdoors, burning off those calories and building muscles!
But these are lifestyle choices, not government.
Yes I know. I had a girlfriend who lived in Gurney years ago so I visited the area frequently.
blah, blah, blah ... progressivism is really great, it’s just that they’re not doing it correctly ...
oh, and i never knew that Chicago and NYC, two major Democrat cities that are imploding with crime and economic contraction, are west coat cities!
i also noticed that not a single counter-example of a well-run, thriving democrat-run city was mentioned when i read the full article ...
“If they kill one person the whole idea will go the way of Solyndra.”
people have already been killed by “self-driving” cars ...
“infant mortality and life expectancy are worse than in Cuba” ... a deceptive half-truth. It depends on how deaths of infants and young children are counted, IIRC.
“... (infant mortality and life expectancy are worse than in Cuba...”
“Nicholas Donabet Kristof is an American journalist and political commentator. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he is a regular CNN contributor and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Born in Chicago, Kristof was raised in Yamhill, Oregon, the son of two professors at nearby Portland State University. Wikipedia”
His liberal bona fides.
This is a major crack in the damn.
Thanks for posting the information.
It seems to support my previous reply.
Fly over America is disproportionately underrepresented especially if it is considered that fly over America is less wealthy per capita and should have more and not less homelessness
(AK, KS, GA, FL TX) besides AK the rest are underrepresented on the cities list as they have to be to avoid a logical fallacy. They can’t be lesser at the state level and congruent at the city level.
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
It’s understandable.
It is very challenging to find the information.
The other reply crossed my mind as WV, KY etc.....have the most OD deaths per capita but it didn’t seem to me to be enough to drag down 2yrs worth of life expectancy difference on the whole.
I really think that number is fabricated. Urban pollution offsets their proximity to state of the art medical care resulting in roughly equal lifespans for decades on end. I highly doubt that it has changed so much so quickly.
They like to imagine that the negatives in education, crime, earnings, health, and child poverty are because of stupid, violent, fat white rednecks, when in reality, those things are over-represented in the black population.
If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list.
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