Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things
Posted on | June 21, 2007
Voting for George W. Bush is hazardous to your physical, economic and educational health. The correlation is strong:
The Commonwealth Fund report, “Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance,” examined states’ performance across 32 indicators of health care access, quality, outcomes and hospital use. Topping the list were Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Bringing up the rear were the Bush bastions of Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Texas, with Mississippi and Oklahoma. The 10 worst performing states were all solidly Republican in 2004…
But health care isn’t the only area where denizens of the Republican heartland suffer relative to their blue state brethren. As Perrspectives detailed in January, minimum wage levels also vary significantly from state to state. Unsurprisingly, many of the “bluest” states lead the way in exceeding both the previous ($5.15 an hour) and recently passed ($7.25) federal requirements, with Washington, Oregon, California, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut mandating wages as high as $7.93. Only one of the 21 states (New Hampshire) mired at $5.15 an hour did not vote for George W. Bush in 2004. (Click here to view a map of the minimum wage by state.)
And the minimum wage is just the beginning. A December 2005 report Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts showed that Americans’ working conditions in general closely follow the 2004 electoral map. The report’s Work Environment Index (WEI) rated the quality of Americans’ working lives by a weighting of three factors: job opportunities, job quality, and job fairness. The top five states were Delaware, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont and Iowa, the bottom five were South Carolina, Utah, Arkansas Texas and Louisiana. Unsurprisingly, all five of the cellar-dwellers are so-called “Right-to-Work” states featuring outright hostility towards union organizing. (Click the following links for maps of WEI by state and right-to-work states.)
When it comes to educational achievement, faithful red state Republicans do a little (but not much) better. Earlier this year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a study titled “Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness.” The report looked at seven different performance categories, including return on education investment, workforce readiness, teacher skills, and academic achievement of low-income and minority students. Again, the top five states (Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont and New Jersey) backed Democrat John Kerry in 2004. Only two of the bottom 15 states similarly supported Kerry.
Voting against one’s own interests has real consequences.
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