Limousine liberals who live in wealthy enclaves have a habit of blasting red states such as Kentucky and Alabama as “Moocher States.”
This attack might not jibe very well with the Democrats’ longtime self-image as the party of the working man, but it fits in pretty well with the last couple of decades of coastal secular liberals attacking conservatives as uneducated, unwashed deplorables.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) has led the way in this Democratic attack on the supposed “moochers.” Gottheimer, a congressman from the wealthiest part of New Jersey, has made mocking poorer and older regions as Moocher States the central organizing principle of his politics.
Gottheimer has called states with a positive balance of payments with the federal government Moocher States. Keep in mind, this isn’t about transfers between governments, but between Uncle Sam and individual Americans.
If you know about the federal budget, you might guess that the biggest chunk of the money going out to individuals is Social Security and Medicare. Kentucky has more old people than the average state, and so it has more people receiving Social Security or Medicare.
The other half of the ledger is mostly federal income and payroll taxes. States such as New Jersey, with lots of high earners (especially Wall Street types who were bailed out a few years ago), will have greater “contributions” to the federal coffers. States such as Kentucky, with more working-class people, will pay less per capita in federal taxes, thanks to our very progressive income tax system.
So the New Jersey Democrat definition of a Moocher State is a state with too few rich people and too many old people.
Maybe that’s not the best definition of mooching, especially when you consider the goings-on of the past few months.
First, you have Gottheimer and other blue state members lobbying for a tax cut that would basically only go to their wealthy residents, and justifying it specifically as a federal subsidy to their state coffers. The deduction for state and local taxes only matters to high-income households in high-tax states because a vast majority of families don’t have deductible expenses that exceed the high standard deduction.
So, the SALT deduction is a subsidy to blue state governments and their residents. In Albany, for instance, lawmakers have justified hiking state taxes on the grounds that the SALT deduction shifts a portion of the tax burden onto the federal deficit.
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Then there’s the DOGE problem.
Maryland, another wealthy deep-blue state, lost its Triple-A bond rating partly over worries that federal spending might go down. If your state’s fiscal health can’t handle a federal government a bit smaller than $6.8 trillion, then maybe it’s a Moocher State.