HuffPo hates the South (with maps)

[pbrower2a]

Wrong title. Should be "Facts hate the South (with maps)".

No, facts expose the South.

I might refer people to the thread "Is Connecticut the Best State in which to Live?" Low levels of education and bad health habits (like smoking and obesity) give objective evidence of the nastiness of life in most Southern states.

Even if one discounts the effects of income one can use statewide credit scores to establish how easy it is to get into economic hardship in some places. Bad credit scores on a statewide level do not so much reflect profligacy with credit so much as they reflect the likeliness of people getting unpayable bills. 

[pbrower2a]

OK, fair enough about the obesity rate.

I'm skeptical, though, of the idea that incomes need to be adjusted for "cost of living" to the advantage of the US. Sure, consumer goods tend to be more expensive (though your two examples are outliers due to supply management and gas taxes). But health care, education, etc., are much more expensive in the States.

If people are getting a good deal from a high-tax, high-service government, then they are likely to continue to want such. If they are getting a good deal from a low-tax, low-service government, then they will want such to continue. Low-tax, high-service governments are impossible, and high-tax, low-service governments tend to undergo revolutionary upheavals.

In general the low-tax, low-service governments worldwide are to be found in Third World hell-holes. Such places generally have a few very rich people with others destitute. 

[pbrower2a]

This is the direct result of the sinister political agenda the GOP has adopted since, oh I don't know, 1968 or thereabouts. 

The GOP stands for big landowners, tycoons, and executives at the expense of everyone else on economics -- while pandering to ignorance and bigotry.

[pbrower2a]

So pointing out basic realities that should be obvious to anyone who isn't a deluded hack is now considered a sign of "white liberal elitism"? TNF, I like you, but you're really making yourself an idiot here.

It's one thing to ignore the undertones of racism and political snark. It's another thing to deny they exist, and then refer to people as idiots, if they rebuff HuffPo's gratuitous hit piece.

When someone slams the South for high poverty rates and teen pregnancy, they are slamming the south for having higher African American and Hispanic populations. It's racist, but HuffPo can't help themselves.

White southerners do badly. In many years they scored worse in intelligence tests than Northern blacks. Something telling about the South -- it attracted very few immigrants when people from southern and eastern Europe were practically flooding America's northern cities. Just look where American Jews are as a surrogate for immigration. Nasty as Manhattan's garment district was a hundred years ago for crowding and poverty, Russian Jews found it far preferable to the places where the cotton for the garments was grown.

Italian and Polish immigrants preferred to go where the schools were strong -- often the parochial schools established by earlier Irish Catholics whose Catholic hierarchy was unwilling to establish any Catholic population as a permanent underclass. About forty years ago one could go to hick towns in Upstate New York and the Midwest, examine the phone book, and find lots of people with Italian or Polish surnames. Even to this day one finds large numbers of Hispanic immigrants relocating to the chilly Midwest. Adults will do horrible jobs but insist that their kids dedicate themselves to their studies.     

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Virginia and North Carolina used to be cancerweed country. That is over. Virginia is a rather good place to live by standards shown in the study, and North Carolina is poor, but not the worst of the worst. Cotton states do badly... and cotton growers are still powerful in several Southern states. Unlike tobacco, cotton is not a dying crop in America.

Those same Southern states built fine Interstate highways which require the States to buy the land and put up 10% of the cost, the federal government putting up 90%. Mississippi and Alabama have put much money into the building of Interstate 22 between Memphis and Birmingham -- not to say that such is a bad investment.

But highways have very clear results in cost-benefit analysis. Real estate next to any rural long-distance freeway interchange skyrockets in value. Costs of transportation plummet. Improving personal health and nutrition isn't so obvious in cost-benefit analysis. It's harder to convince people that they would do better in life if they are healthier and better educated.  Besides, right-wing interests focus upon taxes instead of income.

But think of it -- malnutrition is harsh on productivity. A high percentage of high-school dropouts corresponds to high rates of violent crime. High use of tobacco correlates to heavy expenditures on medical care related to tobacco-related ailments. Even if it is not a question of Right or Left politics, Utah is toward the bottom in per capita income. But it does well in most measures of public health. It's an outlier on tobacco consumption because of the Mormon Church (lowest by far). Its high-school students graduate. Obesity is low (apparently the state has excellent recreational opportunities), and so is diabetes (low consumption of alcohol is a contributor). The violent-crime rate is low. In part because Utah does not spend so much money undoing the effects of smoking and pathological drinking the state can keep its taxes low. Contrast Tennessee. 

My liver and lungs would be normal in Utah even if I am not a Mormon. In most Southern states, I would end up paying for bad habits practically part of the culture.       

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Three tough places in which to live -- extremely urban places with bad weather.

[pbrower2a]

White southerners do badly. In many years they scored worse in intelligence tests than Northern blacks.

Nothing to do with the HuffPo article. They were interested in chastising the South for teen pregnancy and poverty, which are the consequences of Hispanic immigration (Texas) and the lingering consequences of African-Americans living in areas without industrialization until WWII. Basically, blaming the South for the failure of the federal government to economically rehabilitate African Americans in the plantation belt or create a humane agricultural visa system so Hispanics migrants are not trapped in the US, where the cost of living is oppressive.

Southern states long underinvested in education. Getting the crop out was so much more important than making people able to do something other than farm labor that school schedules were adjusted to fit the needs of growers for labor.

Formal education has one of the strongest negative correlations to teen pregnancy. I doubt that any of us can quantify quality of education, but I assume that the richer the content of education, the less likely one is to have a child as a teenager.

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The South has long been a political and economic sewer. It has had cheap labor as a basis of its alleged prosperity for multiple centuries. An economy that depends upon cheap, raw labor (as in basic agriculture) has little need for educational refinement on a large scale -- except for the elites. Welfare in the South existed in part to allow people to stay on the plantation.

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I have yet to see any effort to reform welfare so that it promotes better nutrition. If we were to have new regulations knocking stuff loaded with high-fructose corn syrup (like sodas and candy) and such pure junk as chips from eligibility for food stamps, then companies like Pepsico and Archer-Daniel-Midlands would scream bloody murder. 
 
Public policy is never simple. There are always unintended consequences to any change.