RUTHFULLY YOURS

As states increasingly segregate into red and blue, California, New York, Texas and Florida are the heavyweight contenders. (Although, don’t forget poor Illinois.) A year ago I had the good fortune to hear Governor Ron DeSantis give a speech to a Minnesota group in Naples, Florida. DeSantis said something that I thought couldn’t possibly be correct: that Florida has more people than New York, with a state budget only half as large. Afterward, I looked it up, and it was true. No wonder DeSantis romped to an overwhelming re-election!

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal editorial board compared “New York vs. Florida, by the Numbers.” The comparison tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the relative merit of conservative and left-wing governance:

Take a look at the nearby chart comparing some key indicators of governance in a pair of states that not long ago were about the same size—New York and Florida. As recently as 2013 the two states had similar populations, but so many people have moved to the Sunshine State that it’s now roughly 2.6 million people larger.

Here are the numbers. Read them and weep, if you are a liberal. Click to enlarge:

We see the same thing across the country. Red states are succeeding, blue states are failing. What is hard to understand is why so many blue state liberals don’t understand that their states are dying. Politicians, I get: decline is always a relatively slow process, so they calculate that they will be gone before their states finally circle the drain. But what about the people who live in blue states, who don’t intend to flee to more successful locations, and who will be left holding the bag? I can only assume that they are not familiar with the data.