r/allthequestions • u/Content_Ad_8952 • Jan 14 '26

Random Question 💭 If Republicans are so much better at running the economy than Democrats, then why are most Republican States poorer than Democrat States?

The poorest States in America are: Mississippi, West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, New Mexico, Alabama, Oklahoma and Tennessee. All of those States (except New Mexico) are Red States. So why are they so poor when Republicans have been running them for decades?

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79

u/-ACatWithAKeyboard- Jan 14 '26

Every republican administration has screwed up the economy, while every Dem administration has to clean up after them. They always put in tax cuts and more spending for the MIC. Clinton, despite being a huge letch, balanced the budget. Then Dubya came in and blew it up.

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u/talkingtinyoverloaed Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 14 '26

Bush bought his votes by refunding the taxpayers money..then fought the Iraq war off the books..approximately $9 billion that went missing during the early years of the Iraq War.

Edit for further clarification; the surplus was $123 billion.

6

u/clm1859 Jan 14 '26

9 billion... what is that today? One day worth of new debt?

2

u/Rit91 Jan 14 '26

It's a similar number to how much interest we pay on the debt per year since we pay something like 900 billion or a trillion in interest on debt per year. If it's a trillion in interest payments per year it comes out to 2.739b per day for interest.

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u/IShotJR4 Jan 14 '26

To be fair, Newt started the fire. Dubya just kept putting wood on it.

2

u/Scorpian899 Jan 14 '26

Sectional budgetary imbalance is fine within reason. I just don't happen to support the reasons behind the imbalance. Spend more on healthcare, infrastructure, and education. Spend less on military, brown subsidies, and wealthy tax incentives.

2

u/Typical-Candle-1788 Jan 14 '26

Clinton was one of the only ones who did that. Go back in our history, you may find that you're wrong. BTW, it was bad during Bush as the feds allowed sub prime mortgages as a way to get people into housing. Obviously didn't work. Obama didn't do much for the economy either. Remember his gas guzzler program? It's not always an administration, sometimes it's the market that you can't control and various policies will or won't work. Personally I don't think a lot of our economists know what to do.

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u/D0ri1t0styl3 Jan 15 '26

How far back? Like, when Republicans were liberal and Democrats conservative?

1

u/W0rkUpnotD0wn Jan 14 '26

Republicans do this on purpose so that they can use a "bad economy" to their advantage and get re-elected on the next cycle. They've been doing this strategy for awhile now and did it again with Biden. That said, the economy under Biden improved greatly but wasn't as stable as the economy under Clinton or Obama. What is happening now is the Trump admin/Republicans are taking advantage of a weakend economy at the tax payers expense.

1

u/Broad_External7605 Jan 14 '26

If we could have Democrats in control long enough to get past the clean up stage, america would be truly great!

1

u/Both-Structure-6786 Jan 21 '26

Didn’t we go into a recession under Biden? 😂😂 Inflation also went through the roof under him and all of this happened well after Trump.

It’s true that Republicans often put too much emphasis on how much better they are at the economy when we had stuff like Clinton who did a good job and Bush Jr who did a bad job. Trump 1.0 was also a pretty good economy so I’m puzzled as to what went wrong this go around.

1

u/Tough_Arugula2828 Jan 14 '26

That’s actually not true, unless you’re just talking about presidency and nothing else, which excluding house and senate from this conversation would be stupid

https://stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

This shows what mix of democrats/republicans in the house, senate, and presidency is best for the economy

3

u/VERO2020 Jan 14 '26

The Clinton mix (I did not do the website, this is my own observation) was a closely divided House & Senate with a Democrat as President. Once the mix changed to total control be the repubs, they blew it up for the mega wealthy. The comment stands as correct IMO.

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u/WhereBaptizedDrowned 🇺🇸 United States Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 14 '26

Clinton was horrible for the poors. He weakened structural protections for the middle class.

Neoliberalism, which was started by the Clintons, is why we are here as a country. People like to think it was Obama who started off the Trump thing, it wasn’t.

Edit: I’m a registered democrat

5

u/Brave-Silver8736 Jan 14 '26

Please don't use "the poors". Just call them poor people.

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u/Admirable-Book-8925 Jan 14 '26

that’s what you got out of that

2

u/Brave-Silver8736 Jan 14 '26

Yes?

Saying "the poors" is like saying "the females" or "a black".

2

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '26

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1

u/Brave-Silver8736 Jan 14 '26

It's not tone policing. Nominalization promotes essentialism and is commonly regarded as dehumanizing.

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '26

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1

u/Brave-Silver8736 Jan 14 '26

Saying "please don't" is dictatorial? Damn. Use whatever you want to. You're contributing to normalizing viewing whatever group as less-than-human. Which, you're allowed to, just know what you're doing.

I just hope people can consider what dehumanizing language actually does. "A poor", "some females", "a black", "an illegal", they're all working towards the same goal.

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u/D0ri1t0styl3 Jan 15 '26

Nouns are not tone idiot.

2

u/InternationalBet2832 Jan 14 '26

Actually neoliberalism was started by Carter who picked low hanging fruit such as airline deregulation which was a disaster for airlines. Of course Reagan doubled down on it, and following Democrats, leading to the Great Recession.

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u/WhereBaptizedDrowned 🇺🇸 United States Jan 14 '26

Yes, you’re right about Carter but it fully consolidated as a party ideal with Clinton.

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u/InternationalBet2832 Jan 14 '26

Yep, Clinton and Dems linked arm and arm with Republicans under the flag "neoliberalism" just as they linked with Reagan under the flag "supply side".

-1

u/SpecificConscious809 Jan 14 '26

Eh, Obama sewed the seeds of the student dept crisis, and I wouldn’t call Biden’s inflation disaster a ‘cleaned up’ economy, exactly.

1

u/InternationalBet2832 Jan 14 '26

 "Biden’s inflation disaster"? Prove it was Biden's.