Alex Menendez via AP
Hospitality workers stage a demonstration over unemployment benefits outside a beauty salon where Gov. Ron DeSantis was speaking, May 2, 2020, in Orlando, Florida.
Republicans seem bent on finding a way to punish the blue states in the next tranche of emergency legislation coming from the Congress. Rick Scott, the former governor and current senator from Florida, has contrasted his state’s low budgets with those of blue New York and California (all of which were in balance before the pandemic struck), while President Trump has claimed that “Republican states are in strong shape.” Trump has also chastised states with Democratic governors for their presumed tardiness in lifting shelter-in-place orders. “There just seems to be no effort on certain blue states to get back into gear,” he has lamented.
The real difference between blue states and red, if I may borrow a term from the anti-choice movement, is that the blue states are pro-life while the red states are largely indifferent to same.
That’s certainly clear from the divide we’re seeing on the readiness to open states up at a time when the rate at which COVID-19 is spreading is still increasing in most parts of the country. It’s also true when it comes to matters budgetary. Allegedly well-managed Florida has had perhaps the most inefficient unemployment insurance system in the country. As of mid-April, more than 850,000 Floridians had filed for unemployment, while a bare 34,000 had actually received checks. The number of applicants has now grown to 1.9 million, of whom just 28 percent have received their UI from the state. Had Scott and his Republican successor as governor, Ron DeSantis, invested a sufficient level of public funds to create a more well-run system, Floridians wouldn’t now be subjected to this breakdown in necessary state services.
The other Republican mega-state, Texas, also boasts a low-cost government, but it, too, comes at the expense of its citizenry. Like 12 other GOP-run states, Texas has refused to implement the Medicaid expansion created by the Affordable Care Act, and has otherwise refused to help cover many poor and working-class Texans’ medical necessities. The state’s supposed fiscal rectitude has created the highest rate of medical uninsurance in the nation.
What Texas, Florida, and other kindred states need is genuinely pro-life governments—the kind provided by the blue states that Trump and his ilk are determined to vilify.
