Enough with the "End Red State Welfare" already!
I know you're angry, I know you're hurting, and I know you want to hurt someone else in return, but this doesn't make sense.
This is just "I'm taking my toys, and going home".
(more below the fold, although it seems that dKos wants more up here, since the software is saying that this is a one line diary, 300 character minumum, even though we should only have 3 paragraphs up top, and I carefully wrote it with a catchy opening and a natural break so I have to babble here... sigh)
Some of the crucial differences between the Democrats and Republicans are these:
- We believe that society has an obligation to help the less fortunate, while they believe that the less fortunate probably brought it on themselves and they have to take responsibility for their own actions.
- We believe that there are things that the government can do better than the free market, they do not.
A blanket "End Red State Welfare" doesn't fit our values. And it is petulant. And it does nothing to win over that 3% of voters we need. And it ignores the basic fact that we are not divided into red states and blue states, we are divided into purple counties and slightly reddish purple counties.
There may be a need for Red State Welfare Reform, but that isn't what people here are asking for. They are looking at the total numbers, and screaming bloody murder because they're getting more.
Break the numbers down: what specific programs do you want to get rid of? What part of the social safety net do you want to dismantle?
I'll go first: Florida. Every year they get hit by multiple hurricanes, and every year the federal government spends hundreds of millions of disaster money to rebuild Florida.
These natural disasters should be expected, since they happen each and every year. Florida needs to tax its citizens higher, to cover the costs of their perfectly typical weather.
The federal government should only help after the fourth hurricane of the season, since that is an unexpected disaster.