cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/7076150
If poor people voted reactionary and reactionary policies made places wealthier, then the wealth and political allegiance of places in America would flip flop every few generations. We would expect that places like Texas are getting richer and places like New York are getting poorer, and that 100 years ago New York would have been poor and right wing, while Texas would have been rich and left wing.
But if poor people voted reactionary and reactionary policies made people poorer, then we would see that poor places stayed poor, reactionary places stayed reactionary even through the party switch, and the wealth inequality between reactionary states and progressive states would increase over time.
Which of these two results do you think is true?
Maybe neither?
I would say less educated people tend to vote reactionary. But reactionary policies do not necessarily make people poorer.
Sure they do. For example, there’s the problem of suburbs. A suburb requires more roads, more buses, more plumbing, more electrical, more broadband, more land, more water use, and more energy per person than a medium or high density neighbourhood, like brownstones or terrace houses. Water is wasted on lawns and energy is spent on heating and cooling because isolated buildings have more places to leech heat. And that’s in addition to all the problems of simply taking up more space. Suburbs cost the taxpayer more money, and they’re also bad for small businesses, because people in cars are less likely to spend money at independent grocery stores, cafes, thrift shops, and etc. They visit big box stores and franchises, which leech money out of the community. Everything about the economics of suburbs is a disaster.
So why does America have suburbs? Because Americans are racist. When segregation ended, they wanted a way to avoid living next to black people. And pricing them out of living in these expensive suburbs was a great way to do segregation without technically doing segregation.
