Deadbeats for Self-Reliance

Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff had an article in Sunday's New York Times suggesting that some of the people who are most in favor of severe cuts in government domestic spending are also highly dependent on the federal safety net. This chart—actually a scatterplot—by Aaron Carroll supplements that article. It shows that the residents of conservative states get more help from the government than liberal state residents. The chart requires some explaining.

The vertical axis measures government help. “Transfer receipts” refer to all the payments made by the federal government to individuals, such as social security, Medicare and unemployment benefits. It is divided by total personal income to yield a percentage, so .20 on the chart means that the people of that state derive 20% of their income from government programs. As you might expect, those states that are higher on the vertical axis are those states whose per capita income is lower.

The horizontal dimension refers to how liberal or conservative the state was in a 2010 Gallup poll. “Conservative advantage” refers to the percentage of self-identified conservatives minus the percentage of self-identified liberals. From left to right, the “conservative advantage” increases. The size of the circles represents the population of the states.

The trend is obvious. The more conservative the state, the more government “handouts” its citizens receive. Including all 50 states yields the same result. Of the 25 most liberal states, 16 of them pay more in taxes than they get back. But 23 of the 25 most conservative states are on the receiving end of wealth redistribution. This also translates into voting behavior. Seven of the ten most dependent states voted for McCain in 2008, while only two of the ten least dependent states did.

There are two tempting ways to interpret this chart. One assumes that red state citizens are aware of the inequity from which they benefit and are hypocrites. The Times article reports that when the conflict between their attitudes and their behavior is pointed out to some of them, they rationalized that they “deserve” their government benefits while most other recipients do not.

Another possible interpretation is the false consciousness argument from Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? It suggests that poor state residents are confused and, without realizing it, are voting against their economic self-interest. In effect, they have been duped by the Elephant Party, which appeals to them with ads about abortion and gun control, but once in office, uses their electoral advantage to enact economic policies which primarily benefit the wealthy.

(Of course, you could also argue that anyone who voted for the Jackass Party in the last 20 years has been duped, since once in office, the Jackasses have rather consistently done the opposite of what they promised to do during the campaign.  See "The Mourning After.")

A new analysis of wealth and voting patterns by Andrew Gelman adds some interesting data to the mix. He finds that, in all 50 states, the higher your income, the more likely you are to vote for the Elephants, as would be predicted by self-interest. However, the higher the per capita income of a state, the higher the share of its vote that goes to the Jackasses. That is, there is something about the culture of the poorer states, perhaps relating to social rather than economic issues, that persuades their people to vote for the Elephants.

Furthermore, the relationship between income and party preference is stronger in the poorer states than in the richer ones. As a result, a high percentage of low income people in all states—rich and poor—vote Jackass. But in the poorer states, the middle class and especially the rich, vote strongly Elephant, while in the richer states, there is a higher percentage of Jackass voters among middle and higher income people.

In other words, most of the poor people in all the states are not confused. They vote in their self-interest. But in the higher income states, people who are not themselves poor vote in a way that appears to benefit the poor. (If anyone votes contrary to their self-interest, it's rich people from Connecticut.) In the low income states, upper middle class and rich people vote in a way that is more consistent with their economic self-interest and that is harmful to the interests of the poor. Here's a presentation by Gelman:

Of course, all of these data are correlational, and correlation does not mean causation. A wealthy Mississippian may not necessarily have voted for McCain because he wanted poor people to starve. He may have been motivated more by an opposition to gay marriage, and the effect of his vote on the plight of the poor may have been incidental. Voting is complicated.