After writing Secession Oriented States Get More From Feds Than They Give, it bothered me that I didn’t do the analysis of all the regions. So I did them. I still wish I had the numbers for the individual states, but I was able to run a correlation on what I had.

There is a correlation, but it isn’t that strong — about 80% or 1.2 sigma. The problem is the Southeast: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. This is a very big and heterogeneous collection of states. What’s more, there is a slight problem with the Rockies: Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming. This area is a lot more anti-government than their low federal benefits would indicate. But there is a reason for this. Colorado is 56% of the economy of this region and it has an extremely low federal benefit level (70%). Without it, the level would be 106%. That would put it right along the line implied by the other regions (without the Southeast).

Regardless, there is a correlation: areas that get more federal government largess are more likely to be in favor of getting rid of the federal government. Just the same, the correlation is weak. But we ought to expect that given the grouping of the states. That will tend to reduce the correlation and that is more true the larger the group is, as in the Southeast.

I learned from the Los Angeles Times, Poll: Nearly One in Four in America Would Favor Secession. In one way, this doesn’t matter in the least. It seems that there is always about a third of the American people who are in favor of anything. But this is probably a real thing. Still, the Times is wrong to claim that, “Nearly one out of four Americans is so fed up with Washington that they are prepared to not take it any more and would favor their state breaking away from the rest of the United States.” I doubt that’s true, even if the writer is trying to be cute. What it probably means is that one-quarter of Americans are just crazy.

The data come from a Reuters/Ipsos poll. It also found that men were more in favor of leaving the union as were poor people (probably an indication that they lived in poor states more than that poor people in New York want to leave the union). It is above all an indication that there are a lot of frustrated and angry Americans. A whopping 53% of people who identified with the Tea Party want to leave the United States. This goes along with what I’ve long said: there is a strong tendency towards treason in the conservative movement.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the details of the data. It looks like they just didn’t release it for each state. It is very possible they didn’t have enough data to do a state by state analysis. But going off the regions in the map above, I decided to take a look at just how reasonable dropping out of the union is. As is well documented, the states where the people most complain about the federal government are generally the states that get the most money from the federal government. No one ever said Americans were rational.

I’m sure you’ve seen maps that show how much a particular state gets back from the federal government for each dollar it puts in. The biggest determinant of this is the age of the population. Like Florida gets a whole lot more back because there are so many retired people. Nonetheless, this percentage does tell us a lot about how different states would get along by themselves. But there is a problem: those maps you’ve seen are almost all wrong. That’s because they usually represent a single year. Things change a lot over the years. So what I did was to do the ten year average from the data fro 2004 through 2013. Then, to get the regional values, I did a weighted average based upon how much total money they send in federal taxes.

I only did the calculation for three regions: West, Southwest, and New England. I’m especially interested in the last two because they represent the most and least interested in leaving the country. The return on federal taxes for the regions are as follows:

• $0.85 West
• $1.19 Southwest
• $0.86 New England

In other words: the states are want to leave the union are the ones who depend most upon it. Now some might take exception with the Southwest, because Texas is generally presented as a state that pays more in federal taxes than they get back. While that is true of some years and was true of last year, it hasn’t generally been true. For the last decade, Texas has received $1.02 for every dollar it has sent to the federal government.

But let’s face it: this isn’t about economics. People who want to leave the United States want to do it for cultural reasons. They want to deny same sex couples equal rights. They want to make abortion illegal. And not to put too fine a point on it, but there are a lot more people than you think who want to deny rights to different races and to bring back Jim Crow or worse.

Still, it is interesting to see that economically it doesn’t make sense. And I have little doubt that those who call for secession think that the federal government is screwing them in terms of taxes as well.

As I’ve been clear: I never thought that Scotland would vote to leave the United Kingdom. And I’ve had my problems with the idea. In particular, I think they should have dealt with the monetary issue facing them. They needed to set up their own currency. All they had to do was talk to some people in Spain. Or Italy. Or Ireland, for God’s sake! But overall, I was in favor of Scotland leaving the UK.

It reminds me of a bit from the film 1776 when Benjamin Franklin is arguing with John Dickinson, “We’ve spawned a new race here, Mr. Dikinson. Rougher, simpler; more violent, more enterprising; less refined. We’re a new nationality. We require a new nation.” That doesn’t perfectly apply to Scotland, but I do think it ought to be its own nation. It isn’t Northern England. It is a distinct group of people and to paraphrase Dr Franklin, “It deserves to be a new nation.”

Most liberals were pretty positive toward Scottish independence. But I find it a bit bothersome that some of my liberal friends are thrilled that Scotland is staying in the United Kingdom. As liberals, we should all know that other than the United States, the UK is the most conservative and therefore messed up country among the advanced economies. It is always one step behind us in stepping on the little guy with powerful and innovated new tools. The Scots are a more liberal people. And not only would it be nice to have another liberal country, the break with the UK would probably have pushed England a bit toward the left itself.

Zack Beauchamp has done great coverage of the Scotland vote for Vox over the past month, and yesterday he provided another interesting article, The Scottish Vote Was a Class War and the Rich Won. It is based upon some preliminary research by Susan Johnston. And she found a shockingly clear correlation between support for staying in the UK and disposable income of the voter. I’ve greatly altered the original graph, which actually makes the correlation look even stronger:

There is only thing that bugs me about this graph. This could just be showing an age divide. In general, older people are more wealthy than younger people. But based upon polls before the election, I think we will find that even taking this into account, the Scottish independence vote was very much a class vote. And look at this “10 Reasons for Scottish Independence.” It looks like the Scottish version of Occupy Wall Street:

I especially like the last one, “A fairer society that cares for all its people, not just the rich.” Again, now may not be the time for Scottish independence. I would like the whole issue to be taken more seriously because I don’t want the Scottish people to be hurt. But there is no cause for triumphalism about this vote. It is a mixed bag. But as an American liberal, I stand far more with Scotland than I do the United Kingdom or even Ireland.

But all liberals really ought to think hard about celebrating the continued taxation of Scotland for the purpose of supporting one of the largest and most aggressive militaries in the world. It is terrible that a liberal people are forced to support a government that even when nominally liberal gets anemic leaders like Gordon Brown or war criminals like Tony Blair. And otherwise, they get corporate stooges like David Cameron.

So maybe it is for the best that Scotland remain in the United Kingdom. I’m certainly open to that argument. But this is no time for celebration. The vote against independence is what the rich wanted. If it happens to be the right thing, that’s just a coincidence. The rich get what they want. That’s true here in the United States. And it is sadly also true in Scotland.

Paul Waldman has addressed an important question, Why ISIL Wants to Be in a War With America. But before we get to that, let me throw in with Waldman on another point: it is an insult to YouTube artists to say that ISIS creates “slickly produced” videos. Even he gives them too much credit, “[I]t’s nothing your teenage nephew couldn’t create with a few hours and a copy of any of a dozen free video editing programs.” I think Flames of War absolutely sucks. It’s got one nice (but at this point totally cliched) bit in slow motion. But otherwise, it is cluttered and clumsy. And it doesn’t make a clear point. It is clearly meant to be like Bush the Younger’s “Bring it on” comment. But I only know that because I already knew it. Anyway, the only reason that anyone says that ISIS videos are slick is because they are something more than a man sitting on a pillow ranting.

Waldman’s argument is that ISIS wants the United States to be at war with them. That is obviously true. It is a recruiting tactic. It is also a way for the leaders of ISIS to fluff themselves up. It means that they are the biggest baadassssses in the world. At least in their own minds. I remember in the lead-up to the Persian Gulf War. The television news endlessly repeated that Iraq had the fifth largest military in the world! What that actually meant was that Iraq didn’t have much of a military.

But of course that was true. The United States doesn’t go to war with countries that have big militaries. Is there any question that we will go to war with Russia or China? Of course not! The big prize for the neoconservatives is to go to war with Iran. That would be a total disaster. But that is the biggest game that the chickenhawks are willing to go after. No one wants a proper war where taxes might have to go up or American children might have to be drafted. That’s why we have to whip up terror about little authoritarians the world over — as long as they don’t have nuclear weapons!

The people in ISIS are smart though. They clearly understand the United States a lot better than we understand ISIS. It doesn’t take much to get the people of the United States to start screaming for war. I wrote about this last week, We Will Soon Regret Bombing Syria:

Waldman pointed out that just because ISIS wants the United States to be drawn into this conflict doesn’t mean it is actually to ISIS’s benefit. That’s true enough. But I think he misses the main point: in a fundamental way, ISIS absolutely can’t lose. The best case scenario for the United States is that it crushes ISIS. There will be two results of this. First, no one will care. The United States military is almost the same size (in terms of funding) as every other country in the world combined. So we take out a regional army with a tens of thousands of mostly badly trained soldiers? Who cares?!

The second result is even more important. If ISIS is destroyed, it will just be replaced with another group like it that the American media will claim is “even worse than ISIS!” The reason is because ISIS didn’t spring up in a vacuum. The Sunnis are not happy. They have been oppressed by the newly empowered Shia in Iraq. Now there is something we could do about that. We could create a kind of Marshall Plan for Iraq. But we didn’t do that before and I see no reason why the people of America would beg for it now. After all, there won’t be public beheadings of American journalists and so the United States will go back to its normal posture of making the entire world a lucrative playground for our corporations.

If ISIS is stupid or ignorant in any way, it is this: they don’t need to provoke the United States into stupid wars. We do it all by ourselves. This is because Americans are a bunch of terrified pussies. But ISIS can be forgiven for not understanding this about us. Any reasonable (or right wing authoritarian theocracy) would think that after two centuries a country would be self-assured enough to not act like a child on a playground who’s afraid of being called a chicken.

Paul Krugman wants you to know that it would cost very little to fight climate change, Errors and Emissions. In fact, he wants you to know that doing so might actually improve the economy and spur economic growth. I want him to know that I already knew that. I discussed this last year, Environmentalism Good for Economy Right Now. But he does provide some new work that shows things are even better than anyone thought.

The problem is that this doesn’t matter in the least. Let us consider the twentieth century during which time many tens of millions of Americans had their lives shortened and degraded all in the name of cigarette company profits. Was this good for the economy as a whole? Certainly not. People actively poisoning themselves did not make the auto industry more competitive. It didn’t expand the steel industry. It didn’t make the United States the biggest in the world. No. It made a very small number of people very rich. And in the name of those profits, we let millions of people die. The damage continues to be done.

So even if we discovered that taxing carbon would increase the standard of living of Americans by 50% and make roses smell ever so much better and provide lollipops for the kids, we would not tax carbon. I hate to be a killjoy, but this bears repeating at least a hundred times per day: we do not live in a democracy. It doesn’t matter what is best for the people or the country. What matters is what is good for the powerful. And even though doing something about global warming might be good for the computer industry, the privilege of the computer industry will stop it from standing with the people and against the oil industry.

If the government chooses the people over of the oil companies, who’s next? First they reduced the profits of the oil billionaires and I did not speak out — because my billions came from a different industry…

You know how conservatives are always complaining about how poor people lack impulse control? They are a paragon of virtue compared to the rich. At least the poor know that there are limits on their power. For example, they know that if they jaywalk, some police officer might shoot them in the head because he was “afraid.” But the rich live in a different world where their economic desires are all fulfilled. Thus, they have no impulse control. And why should they have impulse control? Global warming is very unlikely to be so bad that they can’t move to a good location and watch the billions of little people suffer and die from a distance.

Still, I think it is important to get the news out that addressing climate change is not bad for the economy. There are a whole lot of people who argue that it is. I’ve discussed before the three stages of global warming denial, It’s Raining, But Not for Long:

1. There is no global warming!
2. There is global warming, but humans aren’t the cause!
3. Humans are causing global warming, but there is nothing we can do!

But the truth is that there is a fourth stage: “There are things we could do about global warming but it will destroy out economy!” And so it is satisfying to bat down that claim as well. But it won’t matter. There will always be another stage of global warming denial. If all else fails, they will start claiming that addressing global warming will not really provide lollipops as I promised earlier. So it’s hopeless!