Secession, nullification … Is Georgia this crazy?

“Are you really that surprised that politicians are trying to appease a portion of their base?”

Probably not–he just likes winding people up now and again. Don’t we all?

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Midori

This is a response to your 4:02 yesterday. A few weeks ago I suggested that eating locally produced honey is a homeopathic remedy for your allergies. Unfortunately this will not cure your current condition, but it will help in the future. The Dekalb Farmer’s Market on Ponce de Leon has a wide selection of honey. Weeks Honey Farm from Omega Ga. has been my choice for two years. Omega isn’t exactly in the environs of Atlanta, but it works for me. My two favorites are the wildflower honey and the tupelo honey.

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Its interesting how history repeats itself. SC threatened seccession over nullification rights against federal tariffs in the 1830’s. Most other southern states passed on it due to Jackson’s saber rattling. SC eventually caved as well. Jackson was thought a tyranncal despot lording increasing federal power over the states by his adversaries.

America survived Jackson, it will survive Obama as well.

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Kamchak — MY HERO!!!!

Thanks very much

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Make that 166 points below the state average.

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Yeah, your army would be “bad to the bone” after all the Conservatives left out, bwahahaha-

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her eyes wide, her hands gesticulating wildly, on Thursday laid out a third version of what she knew and when she knew it on the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, edging ever closer to debating what the meaning of the word “is” is.

You’d backstab yourselves to death and then surrender, to someone.

Anyone.

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May 14 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Heeeellloooooooooooo??????????????????

Is there anybody in there?

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Thank you Jay for reining in Susan Meyers.
Her comments were scandalous.

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not only that Frederick – they can’t spell “socialist” either.

the ninnies keep adding a “s” to the end.

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Andy’s head exploded again.

Clean up at 5:49 Jay.

Ew.

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Seems these GOPers need someone to help them out with recent events. Here’s a little bit to help you 17 percenters along.

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Doubt it. If they did and lost the protection of the United States government and such, Cuba or Mexico could invade and annex Georgia if they so desired, just a Russia was able to simply roll over its own Georgia, or regions of that nation were simply able to break away and form their own nations like South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Give the fact that Atlanta tends to lean rather towards the Democratic, as does a huge swath of the state around Columbia, both these areas would likely prefer to remain part of the U.S. rather than secede, so the U.S. could of course act to prevent these areas of the state from seceding and remain part of the United States. The New nation of Georgia would lose the area that provides the bulk of its economy in that case.

Whats driving this secession talk is basically the fact that the state is slowly moving into the blue column. with Democrats making up 47 percent of the vote in the 2008 election with trends suggesting that in 2010 this divide will get even closer.

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Something dumber than ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Riiiight.

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I really don’t like it when people throw out the race card, and I’m certainly not trying to do it, but I find it rather interesting, and not coincidental, that people are talking about secession. Big government, especially big federal government, and spending and all the things that these whining secessionist ninnys have never seemed to be bothered with before are all of a sudden talking about leaving. They are yelling about it now, when that’s been the norm since WWII. Now? Oh, all of a sudden it’s un-American and they want to form a new country.

I want to think it’s different, but I don’t. Anyone want to call me a rascist – go for it. I’m not the one wanting to secede.

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Lets see, the Atlanta Metro Area looks like a big blue blotch on the electoral map and the Atlanta Metro area makes up 5,278,904 people of the total roughly 9 million population of the state.

McCain won this state by about 204,000 votes. In 2004, the youth vote made up about 14 percent of this states population, in 2008 18 percent. Obama won his largest amount of voters among the young in this state, and the trend towards younger voters leaning towards the Democrats in this state is not changing. The assertion that as the young get older they change party affiliation does not hold much water. It is rare that people switch party affiliations. A young democrat may support a liberal Democrat, and when they get older, support a Conservative Democrat, but switching parties is rare.

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Bosch not calling you a racist, sure that is some people’s motive. However do you really think that ALL are doing it based on race?

If you do it is your opinion and are more than entitled to it, but may I ask why it is you feel this way?

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Off topic

Looky, looky what I found! Now maybe some of you knew this already, but I sure didn’t.

Billo didn’t think gay marriage was wrong back in 2002, and he wasn’t so fond of holy rollers.

http://www.americablog.com/2009/05/funny-bill-oreilly-didnt-think-gay.html

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jt @ 6:03,

Ahhh, poor baby, I’m sorry I offended you. Not!

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Bosch @ 7:07,

You hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly what’s going on. They’ll try to lie their way out of it, but it doesn’t change the truth.

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Maybe I am way off, but how is legalizing, weed any different?

I am actually in favor of the decriminalization of pot, but just curious if you all feel that Arnold and all the state leg. in florida are guilty of treason, or are stupid and racist too?

Why are they allowed to ignore federal laws and I haven’t heard complaints?

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Come to think of it, it’s the only circumstance in which I’d be willing to surrender more in taxes.

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Off topic

I knew it! Carrie Prejean and Fixed Noise. It had to happen.

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/washington-whispers/2009/05/14/miss-california-on-cable-news-fox–friends-gives-carrie-prejean-her-chance.html

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I have no desire to see any state leave (ok..I DO want to see large parts of california fall into the ocean, but thats plate tectonics not politics) however, for those who like to keep harping that we “lost” the 1861-1865 war, we lost that battle but southerners won the war..we dominated congress for much of the last 146 years ..thats why everything in atlanta NOT named after a black preacher hustler is named after Richard B. Russell

as a side note when liberal teachers enjoyed pointing out that reconstruction was forced on rebellious southerners, I enjoyed pointing back that Jim crow resulted from reconstruction ,,consider it blowback…and I always take comfort than more northerners died in the war than did so on my ancestors side.

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Susan @ 7.29, I saw your linked story. question:

How will anyone be able to tell the CA bubble-brain from the interchangeable, surgically enhanced bottle-blonde they normally have on the show?

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Whiner if you hate America so much – you and your friends are sure free to leave.

And yeah, Jay, to your topic, Georgia is *that* backward.

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Some people are saying our country should get back to how it used to be and how it is supposed to be. What can they mean by that? This country is constantly evolving and changing – that is the beauty of it and why it has been so successful. This certainly isn’t the first time in history our country has expanded the role of federal government – in fact, it has been expanding since it was founded. This also isn’t the first time we’ve run large deficits with the budget. A lot of people wax nostalgic about the ‘good old days’ and about how things used to be so much better, when in reality, those ‘good old days’ never really existed. By most measures, our country is in better shape socially and (until very recently) economically than at any point in its history…

Gotta get through here, almost time for Keith Olbermann. I sure don’t want to miss a second of it tonight.

G’night.

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Another reason for the “secesh” talk is the latest polls for the 2010 Governors election. Oxendine and Barnes are pretty much in a dead heat in the latest Research2000 poll.

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By most measures, our country is in better shape socially and (until very recently) economically than at any point in its history…

Susan Lyers- Yeah, I know, Bush was a pretty good president.

Matter of fact, a few more months of Obozo and Bush will be considered a great president.

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What Bosch and others don’t realize is that those of us who are finally fed up with the ever-expanding reach of our federal Government is because of the HUGE expansion of powers in just the last 4 months. We never dreamed of $9 TRILLION deficits being spoken of as throwaway lines. We never dreamed of the Government taking over private businesses to the extent this one has. We never dreamed of a Congress that would abdicate their power when it suits them, and ignore the results of their actions when it doesn’t.

No one (except a few of us) could have predicted that the creep towards Socialism would become a full-fledged forced march in just 4 months.

It is time for some state to stand up and say “No more”. No more unfunded mandates. No more taking rights away from individuals. No more growth of the Federal power structure.

Maybe it’s time for Georgia or Texas to take the lead on this one.

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WOW!! If the muslim terrorists were to read this blog, they would know how to defeat us. Just create situations where our fear and dislike of each other fuels the flame of a social civil war. I guess we Americans are just like everyone else…self preservation at any cost.

I guess the republicans who want to form an independent state are playing up to their constituents. However the confederate gray room for the the new Oxedine baby is a little scary. Did he really say that he was painting the baby’s room confederate gray? LOL.

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Oh, and NJ? NASA built Cape Canaveral in Florida for two reasons. The primary one was that it was the closest sate to the equator, which would make launches more cost-effective for satellites going into equatorial orbits. The second was due to it’s large coastline which allowed them to fire rockets out over the ocean so as not to endanger humans during boost phases.

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The problem with Republicans and conservatives is that they talk about personal liberty all the time but have passed more laws that attempt to control personal behavior than Democrats have. Most anti gay laws, anti Drug laws, pretty much anti anything that has to do with personal behavior laws, have had been conservative issues, and not democratic. Conservatives with all their talk about small government, like big interference when it comes to personal issues.

On the other hand liberals dont give a damn about people personal behavior.

Starting with the Volstead Act, named after Republican Andrew Volstead, vetoed by Woodrown Wilson and then the veto overridden, and inspired by a bunch of right wing tea totalling religious whacko’s. The Rockerfeller Laws, after Republican Nelson Rockerfeller. The anti drug campaigns of Fiorello La Guardia, another Republican responsible for decades of absurd “Reefer Madness” propaganda about marijuana.

The only Democrat responsible for one of the early drug laws, the Harison Act was the son of Jefferson Davis’ personal secretary and a relative of Robert E. Lee. and the legislation was an extension of his religious teatotaling beliefs.

Of course many of these drug laws had their racist motivations, beleiving that blacks hopped up on any number of drugs would commit vile sexual acts on the flower of white womanhood.

And of course in the last three decades we had Ronald Reagan who in the interests of starting any sort of war, started the War on Drugs.

We have Nixon in 1970 and his Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which reinforced narcotics penalties. While the Democrats prefered the less expensive rehabilitation and education methods.

During the mid 1990s, the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton emphasized treatment for addicts while limiting support for overseas antidrug campaigns. Republicans, led by conservative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the Speaker of the House, have argued that the administration’s approach fails to effectively diminish the supply of illicit drugs. Yet such hardline policies as determinate sentencing advocated by Republicans have resulted in a U.S. prison population proportionately larger than that of any other country.

About HALF of all Americans in people in federal prisons are in for drug offenses, approximately and in all jails about a million are in jail for some drug related crime, either possession of amounts that are deemed to be large enough to prosecute for intent to sell and which more often than not are merely for personal use (in some states having more than one joint or two joints is possesssion with the intent to sell, and having 20 dollars worth of crack cocaine broken into small usable pieces is also considered possession with intent to sell)

Every year in the United States 2 million people are arrested for some drug charge, the vast majority minor possession discovered during a traffic stop for some minor infraction:

This year, about two million people will be arrested for a drug offense. In a great number of these cases, young Americans guilty of nothing more than the possession of a politically incorrect intoxicant – ranging from marijuana to crack cocaine – will be separated from their families, stripped of eligibility for student aid, and eternally exiled from the world of gainful employment. This unfolds hundreds of times each day while we – the privileged – sip our martinis and dare wonder why they don’t make better lives for themselves.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-citrano/an-opportunity-for-presid_b_167140.html

Then when you add the number of people in jails for prostitution, etc, a true picture of these advocate of small government and personal liberties emerges. I want THEIR big government priorities off the American people’s backs.

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Atlanta + Federal Goverment = Detroit
Before the federal goverment was involved, Atlanta had more black millionaires than anywhere in the world. (After reconstruction and before the civil rights era.)

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About HALF of HALF of the folks in GA want to leave the union – again.
Cool! As my meemee in law says, “don’t let the door hit ya’ where the good Lord split ya’.

Since nearly three quarters of us think differently, you won’t get our Georgia. You will simply have to go.

I have already suggested Somalia, they really and truly could use you guys and gals. Perhaps Cuba, I’m pretty sure you could “take” Raoul. You might get the old Jonestown property as a foreclosure sale. Invade Monaco or Lichtenstein. The American Virgin Islands! That’s the ticket! Ya’ll should love that.

Are these 21st century secessionists crazy? Some. The others are ignorant or evil.

Whatever.

Here’s the door.

First:

http://travel.state.gov/passport/passport_1738_2.html

Then:

http://www.expedia.com/daily/hotels/default.asp

Such foolishness indeed.

(

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Get real Dave R. – your campaign of “no more” is complete bs. You’ve had your time with no talks of secession – you’ve had your chance and your line of ideology has failed.

It’s as simple as that.

If you were so concerned, you should have acted years ago, not when there is someone qualified and competent enough to do something to change our country in the right direction.

Your campaign of “no more” is too late. Now the grown ups are in charge, finally.

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Every list of every economic indicator show this to be correct. When Republicans cut taxes on the wealthy they NEVER trickle it down by creating new jobs or starting new businesses. They invest in speculative ventures that make much more profit than the hard work of starting a new business, growing it etc,

Which is why growth of GDP has always been DISMAL under Republicans and low taxes, averaging two percent, and has always been twice as high under Democrats and higher taxes.

ALL the numbers prove this is so.

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Which is why FEWER people actually fall into the economic ranges which would require a social safety net under Democrats and more fall in those ranges under Republican tax agendas

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The coneheads should be working on getting their spaceship repaired so they can head back to their home world — all 17 percent of them. I’m sure Oxendine can lead the way.

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Or as Rutgers economic historian, James Livingstone points out:

Then as now, these supply-side arguments have two defects. First, the history of the 20th century is the record of increasing productivity and output as functions of declining net investment. Economic growth doesn’t require greater investment after 1919, in other words, so it certainly doesn’t need higher profits or executive incomes. In fact, any shift of income shares away from labor and toward capital—any shift away from consumption and toward saving or investment—will be a cause of crisis, not of growth.

For if higher profits aren’t needed for investment in goods production (the “real economy”), they will force their way, as unruly surpluses, into the available speculative sites, for example into the stock market of 1926-29. Or into “high-end consumption.” Or into subprime mortgage lending. Whatever.

The recent private equity mania (“leveraged buy-outs” of publicly traded companies) exemplifies these three tendencies of overwhelming capital surplus, as Ben Bernanke often said before he took up his more taciturn duties at the Fed.

But the stock market has not been as reliable as long-term investors and short-term scalawags alike would want. The dot.com bust still spooks everybody except me, but I’m the historian who compares it to the crash of 1901-02. And how many yachts can a rich man steer toward his own private coast of utopia? Where else to turn? To the housing/mortgage market, of course, the available speculative site where prices were surging after 1995, even after the stock market tumble of the turn of the century.

Second, tax cuts have never, I repeat, have never caused increased investment—not in the 1920s, not in the 1960s, not in the 1980s, and not in our own time. The empirical record is uniform: net investment keeps falling no matter what. Don’t take my word for it. Consult Peter G. Peterson, a co-founder of Blackstone (a private equity group just gone public), and a former cabinet member under Nixon and Ford.

There is no cause-effect correlation between lower taxes and greater investment because, again, economic growth no longer requires, or even allows, increasing net investment. At the macro level, we can improve productivity and output just by replacing and maintaining our existing capital stock—we certainly don’t have to make any additions to it.

So to cut taxes for the wealthiest individuals is to invite them to place their augmented incomes in the hands of people who have no choice except to bet this new money on the available speculative site, in this instance on the housing/mortgage market. There’s no place else to put it if they want to get a return better than a savings account or a stodgy mutual fund. It was a “liquidity driven bull market,” as David Rosenberg, the chief economist at Merrill Lynch, puts it (FT 8/16/07). And it has regulated all others because the bulk of the surpluses generated by tax policy went there. When it turned, everything else did

http://hnn.us/articles/41985.html

The largest lie Republicans have ever told is that tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs and stimulate the economy.

Its false. The ONLY thing that grows this economy is the productivity of its labor force, not capital investment, not tax cuts.

Republicans attempt to confuse Americans by asserting that profit and wealth creation are the same thing. Not only are they not, high profits, according to Adam Smith are DESTRUCTIVE to an economy. It is better to prevent excessive high profits by taxation and encourage businesses to create more consumer by using high taxes to allow them only to avoid high taxes by hiring more employees or raising their wages, which will create more consumption.

The supply side argument that lower taxes creates a better economy has been completly been proven false by the economic catastrophes and scandals that occured during the Reagan administration when low tax rates resulted in speculation in REIT’s, caused huge numbers of hostile takeovers which destroyed hundreds of wealth creating businesses, the junk bond debacle, the failures of the S&Ls and not the last presidents insane tax cuts which are directly responsible for the speculation that caused the housing bubble and the current Great Depression. Because finally two economists from the liberal and conservative side of the economic world have states it, this is a depression and the only thing preventing the horrors of the 1929 depression is BIG GOVERNMENT.

Most B.S. Consevatives have no idea that 2 out of three dollars of all savings and other assets owned by the bottom 98 percent of Americans would have been completely lost had it not been for big government.

And the Republican assertions that an economy will come out of such an economic contraction by itself is false. There are plenty of historical examples of economies collapsing and the civilizations those economies upheld collapsed and vanished and no new economy rose up for centuries.

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Next you have to look at the range between the lowest tax rate and the highest.

When you have the lowest rate set at 15 percent and the highest at 30 percent, each addition of one dollar of income is taxed at a higher rate than when you have a range where the lowest rate is ten percent and the highest is 70 percent. In this case, the bracket creep is extended over a higher range of income and allows those at the lower ends to keep more of their money than those at the higher end, creating more consumers to drive an economy than in the alternative situtation which allows the wealthy to keep more of each dollar they earn then those at the lower and middle ends, therefore lowering the both the number of consumers and the amount of money they can spend.

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The Republican focus on lower taxes for those in the upper income brackets turns the REAL economy on its head. Investment never drives and economy due to the natural limitations of markets where profits are high relative to average income. Its productivity and consumption that drives markets, not investments which merely drives profit, and impedes income earned by workers, which reduced consumption.

Which is why since Reagan became president real income has been relatively static, compared to worker productivity, which has increased by 69 percent since 1979, with no parellel increase of real income.

Prior to Reagan, income at all levels increased at the exact same rate as worker productivity. Tax cuts to the top have not trickled down to those at the working and consuming end of the economy

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In a nutshell N.J. @ 9:16, you essentially have people that earn $8.50 an hour calling themselves conservatives, and voting republican, and the
poor saps will never sit at the table with the high rollers. A rising
tide in this case only lifts the yachts, and waterlogs the row boats.

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The Confederacy… a traditionalist body that sought to create a country in its own image keyed by wanting the right to oppress minorities and people they disagreed with.

Sounds a lot like the Taliban to me.

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How can N.J.’s posts be considered ‘off-topic’ when he is trying to address some of the (false) claims, made by the secessionistas, that taxes and debts and deficits are what they are up in arms about.

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Ahh. As always, NASCAR is well represented here today. You go guys!

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test

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The traitors in Georgia have been particularly emboldened since Sonny “Pray for Rain” Purdue helped get their flag back. Granted, it’s no Stars & Bars, but we all know what it means…

“It was unpatriotic in 2003 to be opposed to the Iraq war.”

“Oh please. Many folks like to make this silly claim, but it doesn’t have much basis in fact.”

Mike, you must have missed those back to back O’Reilly shows in the run up to shock and awe.

The ones where BOR said that any Americans who kept protesting after the bombs started falling were unAmerican.

The next night he came on and made a “correction”. He said they were bad Americans.

At that point I gave up on the man…

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Five states produce 40 percent of the nations GDP. None of them are Georgia. Another five states added to this and you get 55 percent of the national wealth produced in ten states. California, New York Illinois Texas and Florida are the five that produce that 40 percent, add in the New England States and you get the 55 percent.

The entire set of premises given by the secessionists, are totally false. The State government gets back more than it sends to Washington DC in the income taxes of the citizens, but more than a third, and probably more like 40 percent of these states private sector income comes from various other federal money given to Georgia citizens and spent in private businesses. Social Security accounts for 15 percent of all dollars spent in Georgia businesses. Various other social transfer dollars amount to another ten percent. Medicare accounts for 35 percent of the income of hospitals and doctors offices. Tuitions in private colleges are paid for with Hope Scholarships and other federal dollars as are public universities. Universities and private companies receive billions of research dollars in almost every sector of the economy, from the biomedical industries to agriculture. Without these dollars, this state would quickly revert to Tobacco Road.

The ENTIRE State of Georgia GSP is less than 400 billion. The ENTIRE Southeast makes up 22.percent of the national GDP. California alone accounts for 12 percent with a state GSP of more than 1.8 trillion.

Texas has a GSP of 1.14 trillion just slightly more than New York’s 1.103 trillion Florida is next and the next five are Illinois, Pennsylvania,Ohio, New Jersey and North Carolina.

The net result of a Georgia secession whose economy is dominated by the blue area of Atlanta, would be to reduce the rest of the state to the status of a developing nation.

As far as the United States goes, the economic mobility in the UNited States is among the lowest in the developing world:

The American Dream Is Alive and Well … in Finland!

It’s harder to move up the economic ladder in the United States than in other wealthy countries. What happened to the American dream

…As bleak as the recent findings about our ability to move up are, the picture for American families would look much worse if not for the increasing number of women in the work force. Women, while still earning less than their male counterparts, have had far greater upward mobility over the past three decades, largely because they had farther to go to get to the same place. While men’s employment rates, hours worked and wages have been flat or declining during that period, all three measures have increased for women. Isaacs concluded: “Family incomes have grown slightly because the increase in women’s earnings has more than offset stagnant male earnings.”

The streets are paved with gold … in Denmark

Several studies released in recent years suggest that, contrary to popular opinion, Americans enjoy significantly less upward mobility than citizens of a number of other industrialized nations (some of the studies can be accessed here, here and here). German workers have 1.5 times the mobility of Americans, Canada is nearly 2.5 times more mobile and Denmark is 3 times more mobile. Norway, Finland, Sweden and France (France!) are all more mobile societies than the United States. Of the countries included in the studies, the United States ranked near the bottom; only the United Kingdom came in lower.

*********************************************************

THE CAUSES OF IT:

*********************************************************

Blame the “neos”

…Unlike inequality, which some classical economists and most conservative pundits dismiss as irrelevant, there’s broad agreement across the ideological spectrum about the importance of mobility. In the United States, where we take for granted levels of inequality and poverty that would be a front-page scandal in most advanced economies, the stakes are that much higher. It’s one thing living in a new gilded age when we all have a fair shot at ending up among the “haves,” but it’s something else altogether when a nation’s wealth is concentrated at the top of a rigidly stratified society. As Dalton Conley put it, the fact that parents’ wealth is the strongest predictor of where kids will end up “very manifestly displays the anti-meritocracy in America — the reproduction of social class without the inheritance of any innate ability.”…

…Three trends help explain why it’s so much harder to get ahead in America today than it was for previous generations of working people, and why it’s apparently easier to get ahead in more socially oriented countries: differences in education, the decline in union membership and loss of good manufacturing jobs and, more generally, a relatively weaker social safety net. Roughly speaking, the decrease in relative mobility from generation to generation correlates with the rise of “backlash” conservatism, the advent of Reaganomics and the series of massive changes in industrial relations and other policies that people loosely refer to as the “era of globalization.”…

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/70103/the_american_dream_is_alive_and_well_…_in_finland!/?page=entire

Those who shout the loudest about secession and taxation and the causes of the problems in America are basically full of hot air, and stale right wing propaganda.

Americans pay some of the lowest REAL income tax rates in the world. It has some of the lowest government involvement in daily economic life.

And this has caused a completely stagnant economic mobility as well as a society in which almost no opportunity to climb the economic ladder exists. It is, to put it mildly, “the land of little opportunity”

Every one of those so called “Socialist” nations of Europe and Canada provide more economic opportunity as well as more economic mobility

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And lets see how the State of Georgia replaces this:

It ranked 14th of 57 in military procurement contracts,

$1,766,000,000 in food and nutrition services,

$1,411,000,000 in education funding,

$1,800,000 in environmental protection funding and

$11,868,000 in military funding.

Total federal expenditures in 2005 were $59,846,000,000.

Now where are they going to get the money to secure their borders, pay export tariffs etc…

On the other hand, Georgias TOTAL tax burden, including all federal, state and local taxes is 14,570,573,000.

Or to put it simple, look at the total amount of federal expenditures in the state of Georgia (59 billion) and the total of ALL taxes paid in the state, federal, state and local (about 14.6 billion) and you see that Georgia would lose 3/4th of money that comes from government coffers. Or it would have to quadruple its state taxes in order to some how come up with the same money that goes into the economy.

This does not include the almost 7 billion that the state has been awarded in stimulus money. Georgia was the first state to put out its greedy little hands to get the money, while publically railing against it, and the first to set up government procurement offices for receiving and spending it

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