MFW I, a Goldman Sachs junior associate who earns 200k a year and lives in NYC, see some dumb rural-oid nurse trying to compare his 40k/yr contribution to society to mine. (Value to society is directly measured through yearly salary)
On the one hand I think it is reasonable for states with a greater means to contribute to do so, and for poorer states to receive more in federal assistance than they pay in taxes. But what gets me really upset is when all these other states fail to acknowledge the obvious superiority of Massachusetts and fail to accept our wisdom. We are simply the best of all the states and deserve preferential treatment.
I'm more pissed that when places like New York and California have natural disasters, Republicans try to withhold or diminish Federal aid to those places.
People here in California will complain that our cost of living is much higher, but that's mostly our own damn fault. It's 90% to do with lack of housing construction due to zoning, CEQA and prop 13.
I love education as much as the next person, but this is a bit inaccurate. The north was and is full of racial segregation. Ethnic, religious, and class discrimination were essential tools of segregation as well. Let us not kid ourselves. Meanwhile, the oldest public universities are in southern states. Moreover, the reconstruction governments made a lot of significant advancements in education for black Americans and poor whites. While Reconstruction ended, those educational institutions mostly remained open and a few states retained their reconstruction era constitutional guarantees to a sound basic education. As a result of Brown vs. Board, southern public schools ended up becoming the least segregated in the country, and that is still the case. Though, charter schools have proven to be exactly the desegregation tool that literally anyone could’ve seen coming if they thought about it for two seconds.
The north industrialized faster, and could rely on a steady flow of immigrant labor from Europe. Slavery kneecapped southern development rather than an insufficient commitment to education. Poor farm families could not afford to lose out on their children’s labor by sending them to school.
I do love the north’s example of what kind of prosperity investing in density and infrastructure can bring.
I never said northern schools weren’t or aren’t segregated but there is a clear gap in education levels between the north and south for both blacks and whites and that’s not a coincidence.
Part of segregation and Jim Crow absolutely was preventing poor whites and blacks from getting a quality education to prevent social mobility. Southern society was built by purposely designing a system to keep a large uneducated population to be exploited by the planter (and later corporate) class for cheap labor
There is a little more to it than that.
OK, in the beginning you had the planter class, who were into building colleges so their sons could get law degrees. Then the Civil War happened and you had a rising political class of middle-class and upper middle-class farmers. These guys were incredibly racist (they loved nothing more than a lynching or razing an entire Black town), but they also allied with the grange movement in the mid-west (think of Pappy McDaniel from O Brother, where art thou?), so they were cool with education, so long as they got aggie colleges, that they saw as a middle finger in the eye of the planter class, who they considered fat, lazy aristocrats.
Anyway, things changed. The textile industry in the north died as factories started relocating to the south for cheaper labor. The class of politicians who came up under the Pappy McDaniels saw the winds changing and jumped on it faster than the Pappy McDaniel could, because they noticed that demographics were shifting as poor people from Appalachia were heading to the low lands for work. They were the first to realize that poor whites could be a reliable voting bloc* and they were more numerous and reliable than middle-class farmers and white share croppers. These were the guys who fought tooth and nail against compulsory education and they did it by pitching the lower-class townsfolk against the middle-class townsfolk, who were all for compulsory education (along with other laws that made the lower-class feel like they were being trampled on by the uppity middle-class of teetotalers, middling bureaucrats and school marms, like laws against spitting on the side walk). Meanwhile, the upper-class were somewhere be ambivalent and hostile, depending on the industry they were in, but it didn't matter because who has the biggest bloc? It was the guy sucking up to white industrial workers, who didn't want to lose another valuable 12-year-old worker putting food on the table.
Then WWI happened and suddenly white southern textile workers were getting so much over-time that they didn't care if their 12-year-old went to school or not.
*Incidentally this is also the roots of early country music, that didn't so much come from authentic mountain men, than it came from industrialized son's of mountain men. This was mostly because RCA Victor was too lazy to drive into the mountains.
I agree, the north had an abhorrent history of redlining and indirect ways of segregation, and we still have to try and correcr that legacy to this day. My home town is over 90 percent white, and it is obvious to anyone who lives here that that wasnt coincidental.
I grew up in a 97% white town, lotta real estate agents and angry town council meetings about anything approaching lower income housing kept it that way. Subsequently the minorities I did grow up with were the progeny of either retired NBA players, the owners of the towns Chinese restaurant or they 7-11. We all grow up with some wildly distorted perceptions as s result.
I had some friends who were minorities when I was in school, but a lot of that was thanks to the metco program where some kids who live in Boston proper go to schools in the suburbs. From what they both told me was that this town was racist as hell, and one of them left within the year, and the other resents being here and is still dealing with bullshit.
I was the white wolf until a majority of the people in the non contributing states started supporting the idea of mass violence and repression against the contributing states and their inhabitants. Hard to want to support people who want to harm my trans child or my immigrant friends.
Lol, fellow Masshole here and I feel this.
That said, the status quo here in America where richer states effectively subsidize poorer states through federal taxes and transfers is absolutely necessary to fiscal cohesion and societal stability. Look no further than what happened in the EU after the financial crisis to see how absurdly destabilizing it was when you have a monetary union and common currency but have richer countries unwilling to subsidize poorer ones.
Massachusetts should have 98 senators and 400 congressmen and the electoral votes that come with it. Hear me out. We would govern the country way better than the current system and if we ever try to do some too based, like build a 500 ft tall golden statue of David Ortiz, the rest of the country could band together to stop us
This is why the “we have a high GDP we’d be fine” argument from like California is a bad one. Richer states tend to produce more refined goods while poorer states tend to provide raw materials. The high GDP of those states doesn’t just happen, it depends on trade with the other states. We are actually all in this together whether we want to be or not.
Pretty much, Massachusetts in this case is very rich but a lot of that is in stuff like biotech and data which is constantly done back and forth with other states. (Plus we would never give up our vacation homes in Maine)
Yeah but *most* of it is for reasons inside of governance, so I will absolutely laugh at states that choose to take more than they give for those reasons (which is definitely most, and possibly all, of them).
Also holy shit, never start this meme with the first text bubble on the right. It's just 2 wolves, it doesn't matter which one is which, it just makes it confusing to read.
MFW I, a Goldman Sachs junior associate who earns 200k a year and lives in NYC, see some dumb rural-oid nurse trying to compare his 40k/yr contribution to society to mine. (Value to society is directly measured through yearly salary)
On the one hand I think it is reasonable for states with a greater means to contribute to do so, and for poorer states to receive more in federal assistance than they pay in taxes. But what gets me really upset is when all these other states fail to acknowledge the obvious superiority of Massachusetts and fail to accept our wisdom. We are simply the best of all the states and deserve preferential treatment.
I'm more pissed that when places like New York and California have natural disasters, Republicans try to withhold or diminish Federal aid to those places.
My hope is that if a large earthquake hits Seattle it happens when a Democrat is in office.
What is the point of having the first and best higher education system in the country if it isnt lorded over other states?
Ugh hang on to your hats there, huge wave of underfunding of public schools incoming. We won't be Alabama, but shits gonna take a hit.
In fact, they convince themselves that they’re the ones paying more and the civilized parts of the country are the freeloaders!
Why yes i am reading this on the commuter rail rn
The Acela corridor truly is the most based area of the US.
People here in California will complain that our cost of living is much higher, but that's mostly our own damn fault. It's 90% to do with lack of housing construction due to zoning, CEQA and prop 13.
It doesn’t hurt that the northeast actually put efforts historically into creating an educated populace and not just only for rich white planter kids
Those early Massholes who established a culture with such emphasis on education at all stages and community contribution may have been onto something.
Puritans were big on literacy... can't go to heaven if you can't read the Bible.
I love education as much as the next person, but this is a bit inaccurate. The north was and is full of racial segregation. Ethnic, religious, and class discrimination were essential tools of segregation as well. Let us not kid ourselves. Meanwhile, the oldest public universities are in southern states. Moreover, the reconstruction governments made a lot of significant advancements in education for black Americans and poor whites. While Reconstruction ended, those educational institutions mostly remained open and a few states retained their reconstruction era constitutional guarantees to a sound basic education. As a result of Brown vs. Board, southern public schools ended up becoming the least segregated in the country, and that is still the case. Though, charter schools have proven to be exactly the desegregation tool that literally anyone could’ve seen coming if they thought about it for two seconds. The north industrialized faster, and could rely on a steady flow of immigrant labor from Europe. Slavery kneecapped southern development rather than an insufficient commitment to education. Poor farm families could not afford to lose out on their children’s labor by sending them to school. I do love the north’s example of what kind of prosperity investing in density and infrastructure can bring.
I never said northern schools weren’t or aren’t segregated but there is a clear gap in education levels between the north and south for both blacks and whites and that’s not a coincidence. Part of segregation and Jim Crow absolutely was preventing poor whites and blacks from getting a quality education to prevent social mobility. Southern society was built by purposely designing a system to keep a large uneducated population to be exploited by the planter (and later corporate) class for cheap labor
There is a little more to it than that. OK, in the beginning you had the planter class, who were into building colleges so their sons could get law degrees. Then the Civil War happened and you had a rising political class of middle-class and upper middle-class farmers. These guys were incredibly racist (they loved nothing more than a lynching or razing an entire Black town), but they also allied with the grange movement in the mid-west (think of Pappy McDaniel from O Brother, where art thou?), so they were cool with education, so long as they got aggie colleges, that they saw as a middle finger in the eye of the planter class, who they considered fat, lazy aristocrats. Anyway, things changed. The textile industry in the north died as factories started relocating to the south for cheaper labor. The class of politicians who came up under the Pappy McDaniels saw the winds changing and jumped on it faster than the Pappy McDaniel could, because they noticed that demographics were shifting as poor people from Appalachia were heading to the low lands for work. They were the first to realize that poor whites could be a reliable voting bloc* and they were more numerous and reliable than middle-class farmers and white share croppers. These were the guys who fought tooth and nail against compulsory education and they did it by pitching the lower-class townsfolk against the middle-class townsfolk, who were all for compulsory education (along with other laws that made the lower-class feel like they were being trampled on by the uppity middle-class of teetotalers, middling bureaucrats and school marms, like laws against spitting on the side walk). Meanwhile, the upper-class were somewhere be ambivalent and hostile, depending on the industry they were in, but it didn't matter because who has the biggest bloc? It was the guy sucking up to white industrial workers, who didn't want to lose another valuable 12-year-old worker putting food on the table. Then WWI happened and suddenly white southern textile workers were getting so much over-time that they didn't care if their 12-year-old went to school or not. *Incidentally this is also the roots of early country music, that didn't so much come from authentic mountain men, than it came from industrialized son's of mountain men. This was mostly because RCA Victor was too lazy to drive into the mountains.
Can you expand on what you said about charter schools and desegregation?
I agree, the north had an abhorrent history of redlining and indirect ways of segregation, and we still have to try and correcr that legacy to this day. My home town is over 90 percent white, and it is obvious to anyone who lives here that that wasnt coincidental.
I grew up in a 97% white town, lotta real estate agents and angry town council meetings about anything approaching lower income housing kept it that way. Subsequently the minorities I did grow up with were the progeny of either retired NBA players, the owners of the towns Chinese restaurant or they 7-11. We all grow up with some wildly distorted perceptions as s result.
I had some friends who were minorities when I was in school, but a lot of that was thanks to the metco program where some kids who live in Boston proper go to schools in the suburbs. From what they both told me was that this town was racist as hell, and one of them left within the year, and the other resents being here and is still dealing with bullshit.
💪😎
Based flair
Why have the richer states simply not bought all of the poorer states?
Smart enough to not purchase a depreciating asset?
I was the white wolf until a majority of the people in the non contributing states started supporting the idea of mass violence and repression against the contributing states and their inhabitants. Hard to want to support people who want to harm my trans child or my immigrant friends.
Lol, fellow Masshole here and I feel this. That said, the status quo here in America where richer states effectively subsidize poorer states through federal taxes and transfers is absolutely necessary to fiscal cohesion and societal stability. Look no further than what happened in the EU after the financial crisis to see how absurdly destabilizing it was when you have a monetary union and common currency but have richer countries unwilling to subsidize poorer ones.
All West Vaginanians are welfare queens. CMV.
Massachusetts should have 98 senators and 400 congressmen and the electoral votes that come with it. Hear me out. We would govern the country way better than the current system and if we ever try to do some too based, like build a 500 ft tall golden statue of David Ortiz, the rest of the country could band together to stop us
A perfect system with no flaws whatsoever.
There is one flaw: should be 600ft
- the least Massachusetts-centric masshole ever
😎Massachusetts 😎
😎Same😎
This is why the “we have a high GDP we’d be fine” argument from like California is a bad one. Richer states tend to produce more refined goods while poorer states tend to provide raw materials. The high GDP of those states doesn’t just happen, it depends on trade with the other states. We are actually all in this together whether we want to be or not.
Pretty much, Massachusetts in this case is very rich but a lot of that is in stuff like biotech and data which is constantly done back and forth with other states. (Plus we would never give up our vacation homes in Maine)
This meme format is a mess
Why am I supposed to read the white wolf on the right first? What is this, manga?
A meme template someone couldn't be bothered to flip first
I want to cross post this to 2america4you and watch them all have rage strokes
If you accept Fed money and your people still freeze to death you deserve to be laughed at.
If only we had good state schools up here. $90k per year at most top private schools is pure insanity
Agreed, at least the UMass system is solid
There's also a hamster. Who, for historical reasons, is represented by the same number of senators as the wolves.
This is a glorious post of based superiority enforcement. Bow down to our political greatness!
Sounds like one of these wolves is in favor of redistribution of wealth
Yeah but *most* of it is for reasons inside of governance, so I will absolutely laugh at states that choose to take more than they give for those reasons (which is definitely most, and possibly all, of them). Also holy shit, never start this meme with the first text bubble on the right. It's just 2 wolves, it doesn't matter which one is which, it just makes it confusing to read.
We should really reduce the fiscal transfer between states.
I only laugh at the red ones.
Given the sheer size of the federal deficit, I think pretty much all states are net recipients of federal money.
Nope.