You can't help but wonder what information people use to decide on who to elect.  Consider this map based on data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census (Link to data source).  This map provides you with the distribution of poverty percentages by county in 2009.  The red areas are the areas with the highest levels of poverty. 

There is an interesting relationship between the states with the most counties with high levels of poverty and the voting paterns of those states.  The political red states are also the poverty red states.  It is certainly an oversimplification to suggest that there is a cause and effect relationship in either direction.  That said, it is hard not to puzzle over why the states with the highest level of poverty tend to support politicians that are the least willing to take steps to address poverty.

I am not talking about opposition to welfare.  I am talking about politicians who eschew funding for a vast array of services that serve to provide people with the education and support systems to rise out of poverty.  The question is if our national economy can effectively recover with so many people living in poverty.  

Economists are increasingly discussing the potential problems associated with high levels of poverty and wider and wider gaps in the distribution of income.  This is often cast off as a form of class warfare, but the wider issue is the degree to which we are in the midst of a decline in our standard of living. It's nice to believe that poverty is something that anyone can rise out of given hard work.  If it were only so.     

The Wealth Gap

I believe that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I am providing a link to a website that offers some very interesting maps of poverty and wealth:  http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2007/08/11/united-states-poverty-map/ .  If you look at the three maps, one on poverty, one on income inequality, and one on household income, a pattern is revealed.

The worst-off part of the country is the South.  In fact, there is a striking relationship between those states that are called red states and having sizable areas of the state that fall into the lower-income categories.  Of course, this high-level cut of the data makes any conclusions about the meaning of this relationship suspect.  I will leave it to the reader to ponder the issue and consider the possibilities.

What can be said is that there are consequences that are reverberating through the United States as income inequality increases.  These gaps show up in those with lower incomes having lower health status, less educational attainment, and even less motivation as workers.  In addition, even as we extol the virtues of education as one of the saviors of our economy, states, especially the poorest, are cutting education budgets at every level. 

As wealth increasingly rests among the few, the traditional mechanisms of educational funding, including property and sales taxes, have become strained.  The explanations for this is simple.  First, wealth now rests in the investments of a smaller and smaller subset of the population, investments that once were sources of property taxes such as manufacturing plants, but are now often in non-taxable investments that are outside of the U.S.  This is compounded by the fact that that share of income that is paid in sales taxes tends to go down, so as income distributions become more skewed, the proportion of sales taxes goes down. 

There is probably no easy solution to this problem, but if we don't begin to look at it and address it, we will see the standard of living of our country decline.  

Lie to me

If you've watched the show, "Lie to Me," you have a pretty good sense of the latest motto for most Americans.  Nothing drives me crazier than the unending assault of prevaricators who will offer one theory or another, but never be challenged to back up the assertion.  Consider this map based on U.S. Census data on the uninsured.  The greener the area, the higher the proportion of the uninsured.  The fact is that many of the uninsured are agricultural workers in Texas, California, and Florida.  Given the rhetoric of both parties, you would either believe there are no uninsured at all, or that they are everywhere. 

Then there are those who seem to think that the best way to save the economy is to cut government spending.  I'll be the first to step up and argue that there is a great deal of waste in what government does, but consider the number of private bankruptcies each year.  People just mess up, whether they are in the government or the private sector.

Now let's consider the spending cut idea.  First, short of Iraq and Afghanistan, this is not just money being thrown out the window.  It's money going to businesses for purchases and to pay employees.  So, logic tells you that if you cut spending, there will be fewer purchases and fewer jobs.  Doesn't that make us worse off?  Now if capital was flowing freely into the private sector and cutting spending would boost that, OK, but who are you kidding?  Common sense tells you that cutting spending is just not a good idea in the middle of a recession.  If someone tells you it is, I suggest you watch the show, "Lie to Me," and see if you can pick up the signs.