Liberal Talk Radio

From the reap-what-you-sow department:

[Rep. John] Peterson is no bleeding heart. The Pennsylvania Republican has a 91 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. But he realized quickly that the budget Bush proposed would hit hardest some of his most loyal supporters: the red states that voted GOP last year and other conservative constituencies across the country.

Note to the GOP: if you’re going to become the party of rural America, be prepared to also become the party of big government. Guess what? The costs per constituent served are many, many times higher in rural areas than urban ones. Phone service, electrification, postal service… you name it. All very expensive for for rural folks, thus the need for heavy subsidies. The most famous example, of course, being the Tennessee Valley Authority, that stinkin’ big-government program implemented by that stinkin’ Commie FDR, which all by itself lifted most of the Southern U.S. out of the middle ages. And how’d the South repay FDR for this extreme generosity? They voted Republican for the next 50 years.

On the plus side, though, I suppose it’s commendable that Rep. Petersen is still paying attention to rural America after the election. Most of the time the GOP line is to pay lip service to rural folk during the elections and then return to their real constituents, the corporate elite who live in… um…. big-ass cities (summer homes and ski chalets in Montana and Wyoming nonwithstanding).

WaPo’s Milbank continues:

According to an analysis of Bush’s budget proposals, red states won by Bush in 2004 would experience cuts in federal grants in 2006 equal to 2.33 percent of their budgets on average. But blue states won by the Democratic nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), in 2004 would lose federal grant money equal to only 1.74 percent of their budgets on average.

Ah yes. Bruno and the Prof readers saw this one coming months ago. Turns out that Red States suck at the federal teat much more than Blue States, mostly due to the fact that those states are more rural. Indeed, one can say that the ONE THING that makes a state “red” or “blue” is whether enough the urban population in that state is big enough to outweigh the rural population.

The bottom line is this: rural America is expensive to maintain, so trying to maintain it is fundamentally contradictory to the GOP’s small-government ethos. Most welfare recipients are rural white Americans, not inner-city blacks, as some ant-welfare advocates would have you believe. And you know what? I’m a compassionate person. I do believe that government of a great nation has a place helping the less fortunate. And, as a card-carrying Urbanist who loves to spend his weekends in the mountains, I’m happy to subsidize rural America. All I ask in return is that you let me marry who I want, empower women to make their own reproductive choices, and keep handguns purchased at rural gun shows out of my neighborhoods.