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Comment by google_censors | Hacker News Reader

Something I find interesting is that so many states that are heavily democrat have such high income inequality. I've always hoped that states like Massachusetts, California and New York would do more to help the poor considering that they seem to have enough voter support to do that.

https://www.axios.com/income-inequality-blue-red-districts-6...

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Are you sure that they don't help the poor, or could it be that they just have more poor? Poor people are more likely to stay in (or gravitate toward) places where more aid is available. They're more likely to die in places where less aid is available due to "you deserved it" moralizing with an undercurrent of discrimination (somehow people who look just like the donors do get aid instead of blame). Also, disproportionately-poor immigrants tend to arrive in "blue" coastal cities and stay in them to be around people with whom they share language and culture.

So yes, there are a lot of poor people in "blue" areas not because of but despite greater efforts to reduce inequality. There are also more people pulling on the other end of the distribution because "blueness" tends to be highly correlated with growth especially in areas like tech and finance. The relative uniformity of "red" areas has a bit of a Harrison Bergeron quality to it, and that's not a good thing.

We do. We send our tax dollars to help support the impoverished red states. ;-)

Tossing political flamebait into HN threads like this is vandalism. So is perpetuating the flamewar after you started it.

We ban accounts that do this repeatedly, regardless of which color the flames burn. Please don't do this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How was the parent comment not similar?

How is anything politically-related on this forum, supposedly for discussion of startups, not in some way inflammatory? What about the post itself? Not to mention that I and another user backed up my (yes, off-the-cuff) comment with references? I don't see how that 'perpetuates a flamewar'?

Vandalism is a rather strong word.

Feel free to ban this account. I can always make another if I decide there's any discussions worth participating in.

It’s more that the Federal Government sends a lower proportion of the $1 trillion borrowed every year to the blue states, compared to the red states.

Nice strawman. You could, at least, back the claim.

LMGTFY.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...

https://www.businessinsider.com/red-states-are-welfare-queen...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/04/democ...

Also, even if you don't believe it, it's not a strawman because it wasn't being attributed to someone else. Please try to balance out the random general-purpose rhetorical tricks with some actual facts or insight of your own next time.

[flagged]

> Thanks for the petty insults

Maybe don't accuse people of making strawman arguments when they merely repeated well known facts, then. That's not civil either.

I think you're confusing me with another user. I never made any strawman accusation at all.

I've banned this account for trolling, including because of the trollish username. At a minimum, that is distracting. Would you please not do it again?

More importantly, please stop posting flamebait to HN threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Must have been confused because you were complaining about insults directed at another user. How odd.

You're welcome.

And I think the California government and many of its supposedly liberal citizens could do more as well. "Screw you, I got mine" applies to both sides.

Even better, we as a nation should be implementing all those and not just leaving it up to wealthy states.

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