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 ...
The infant mortality stats aren’t calculated the same way from country to country- I doubt Iceland includes the deliberate culling of Down’s syndrome babies as part of its infant mortality stats. Other countries simply do not record some deaths - stats from dictatorships like Cuba that have no opposition candidates cannot be assumed to be accurate at all.
From what I understand the US includes aborted infants and other children in the mortality stats that simply are not recorded elsewhere.
It is like educational stats where people compare the success of a prefiltered group of children in one country where the poor performers were weeded out by the system and sent to the trades years before and not allowed to proceed up the ladder to college- to that of the US where the stats are for the entire group of kids in that age bracket who have not been presorted at all.
I don’t doubt the life expectancy stat. I would attribute it to three things:
1) Violence and malaise in the Democrat-run cities which reside in red states (e.g. Memphis)
2) Obesity being generally more common in red states, probably related to lower incomes
3) Obesity being particularly prevalent in minorities, of whom there are more in the red states
The government-loving amongst us want self-driving cars. They are easy to control by the typical government tyrant. Don’t be so lazy. Drive your self and go where you want...when you want. Freedom does take some effort.
It seems that obesity anywhere results from individuals not taking care of themselves through a reasonable diet and regular exercise. Obesity has nothing to do with income. It has to do with personal choices made by the individual.
I agree, pulling out the trope about Cuba indicates really defective analysis or even awareness of what’s going on around him.
I think the stats show a correlation with obesity and income. But yes, obviously it comes down to personal choices.
Don’t underfed rats in cages live longer?
LMAO
nice little trick there liberals try to pull
looking at the state instead of the cities they control.
In a historic irony the real reason for numbers looking opposite on a state wide scale is blacks. Blacks which only make up 12% of the population are nearly all in Republican states! So when you compare liberals states to conservative ones, all those stats they mention make it appear like liberalism is better in many ways. But the truth is blacks in Republican states drag down the numbers they mentioned.
If you look at cities though, the real truth is starkly clear. All of those numbers are what you would expect, with Republican areas (non black ones) outperforming liberal areas in all metrics they mention.
Which means ignoring the fact that it is easier to unsheltered homeless in CA and Oregon than Vermont, New York and Maine, yet both much foster American poverty (which is usually not, relatively speaking) by easily obtained welfare.
Republicans are irrelevant in much of the Far West, so they can’t hold Democrats’ feet to the fire — leading Democrats in turn to wander unchecked farther to the left.
Meaning that the Left, left to themselves, the NE, which the author uses to argue that being liberal does not mean being like CA and Oregon, the NE would becomes like the latter.
I would guess that red states have absorbed most of the illegal immigration into the country. If so, that would also be dragging down the statistics.
A philosophy of corruption ,cheating,lying and not to mention attempting to put your opposition in jail for bogus crimes.. has a negative affect on a society in general.
Then add to that a propagandists media,insane regulations,inflation,mostly bogus claims of racism by racists,rioting and decriminalization of crime..and viola you have a sham democracy thst calls itself democrats.
Last I looked, liberalism is failing EVERYWHERE. As usual, they refuse to accept responsibility, it’s just shifting the blame somewhere else. If they want to eat their own, fine. Just, PLEASE- stop being dishonest about the causes.
East Coast Liberals and Midwest Liberals and Southern Liberals are NO different.
Another ignorant leftist.
Yeah, but he sounds intelligent and thoughtful.🤔
Kristof is an old true believer trying to sound reasonable. He has to ignore huge swatches of reality to do so.
He lies a lot too. In public education, California ranks 35, below the scorned Mississippi. Oregon ranks below Indiana. Washington state doesn’t crack the top ten.
Communists believe destroying something that works is a victory worth celebrating.
Oregon is number 48 in the country and one of the highest costing states.
“.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.”
Bunch of baloney right there
Please name some neighborhoods. The ones I have traveled in recent years- my daughter and her husband live in a Northwest neighborhood-not a suburb- and my son in law’s family lives around the North Shore, and I can tell you, there are people of every ethnicity in those areas.
AND, I might add, while crime is there, it’s not NEARLY as bad as South and West of downtown.
And lastly, I have been a patient at Loyola Medical Center in Maywood, not the safest area, but a helluva lot better than Austin and Garfield Park.
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