This may come as a shock to you, but the red states are not all backward rural areas inhabited by gap-toothed inbreds. Whatever "innovation" is performed in blue state cities, it can be easily duplicated in the red states, to the extent it is not already. In fact, the blue states with their intractable problems, high taxes and quality of life issues, would face an immediate brain drain, as high achievers flee. It will be a big harder to duplicate oil fields and farm land, or buy it from us when you produce nothing anybody wants to buy.
The evidence says otherwise. Yes, there's Atlanta and Dallas, but they're the exceptions. Notice that NC, for instance, as soon as its cities - Charlotte and Raleigh - started producing something else besides rural commodities, first were in play, and then turned blue. Hmm. When the "red" states start producing Googles, Starbucks, Amazon, Boeing, Forest Labs, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, you name it, not just as transplants, but as homegrown companies, and in quantity, enough to start contributing more than they take from the Feds, talk to me. Till then, you don't have a case.
Huh?? Early Americans had liberty. Liberty has nothing at all to do with economics. Edit: interesting note on blue state california, 7000 families with net worths over a million dollars left not the state in 2007, but just Los Angeles County, according to this article... how blue can a state be with no wealthy class? http://www.dailynews.com/editorial/ci_11265873
Yes, we could. If the Bankers withhold credit for another year and more Madoffs lay under the surface, I think we'll see more County, State and private pension funds go under. When that happens, all bets are off. People will riot in the streets. The 50,000 strong Army Brigades reassigned to the Homeland get deployed. Military fires on Americans. Shooting War erupts. Then it snowballs. Everything hinges on how bad the economy gets and how badly the average Joe gets fucked. If the Bankers blow-out pension funds for entire states and Fortune 500's, there's gonna be riots, violence and shooting. Guarenteed. If we go into a Depression - the only way that kind of Civil Insurrection could manifest, economically speaking - then, yea. The Blue States support the Government crack-down on the "Back-water" Red States, who predominately use the 2nd Amendment to defend themselves against police and military. Thats if things play-out in a predictable fashion. If everyone gets fucked, the whole Country could rise up and strike back against the Government. Its gonna take WMD's inside the US, or a Great Depression to get us there.
You don't get it. This is not a contest, financial or otherwise, between red and blue states. It is a matter of the glue that holds a country together beginning to fail. Your resentment and contempt for red staters is palpable. I would think you would be grateful to get rid of people you seem to regard as economic leeches. Of course, the reality is far different. The blue states would be economic basket cases within a couple of years if left to their own devices. The blue state elites may have contempt for the red states, but they still want to exercise dominion over them.