The Blue-State Meltdown

«Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care. But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009. Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area».

Ross Douthat, sul New York Times, riprende (e ammorbidisce) la tesi sostenuta qualche settimana fa su The American da Joel Kotkin (fellow alla Chapman University e direttore esecutivo di newgeography.com) sul collasso economico dei blue states e del “modello Chicago”. Lettura istruttiva - almeno in teoria - per i nostri amici liberal.