The Real Welfare States
Time to call them what they are.
I ran for State Representative a few years back in my beloved home state of Ohio. I have many stories from the campaign trail, but today, there’s one specific story I’d like to share.
A few months before Election Day, I posted something on Twitter about the silly belief many hold that Republicans are better on economic issues than Democrats. I honestly have no idea how this ever became a thing, since the GOP has been in charge during every economic crisis of my lifetime, but believing things that aren’t true is pretty much the GOP gospel these days. So it didn’t surprise me at all when a man from Birmingham, Alabama chimed in on my post and called me a “tax-and-spend liberal.” I heard a lot of that stuff during the campaign, but this one time, and just this one time, I fired back. I’ll tell you what I told him.
Every state in America pays into the federal system, and every state also takes federal dollars out of the system to pay for everything from building bridges and roads to subsidizing low-income families to educating children. But these funds are in no way evenly distributed. For example, my home state of Ohio takes roughly $1 in federal subsidies for every dollar it pays into the system, but Alabama, where my Republican heckler is from, takes in almost $4 in federal subsidies for every dollar it pays into the system, and the three unearned dollars they get for every dollar they pay … well, that comes from exactly where you think it would. It comes primarily from blue states that pay massive amounts of money into the system and take out far less than they pay in. Simply put, we have states that make money, and states that couldn’t feed themselves without federal subsidies. Most of the South is the latter.
After I told the man this, I told him that the first thing he has to do if he wants to call me a tax-and-spend liberal is not be from Birmingham, Alabama, where his lifestyle is propped up by the very people he likes to shout at.
The guy sent me fifty bucks and wished me luck in my campaign.
I told you that so I can tell you this: It’s time to defund the welfare states, or at the very least it’s time to cap what they can take from the rest of us just to prop up their corruption. If Trump and the DOGE virgins are really looking for waste, fraud, and abuse as they say they are, then it’s time to get the Deep South off the government dole. I’m tired of paying them to hate me, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.
And if we’re looking for a place to put all that newly recovered welfare cash, I think we should give it back to the hard-working blue states that actually earned it. And if red states have a problem with that we can tell them what Trump told them right before he crashed our economy for the second time.
We can tell them it’s their “Liberation Day.”
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days fighting for working families as the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show, and his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.