What Makes a State or a Citizen "Independent"? Assessing One Puzzling Answer
On Verdict today, Professor Dorf published "Political Violence’s Potency," while I published "Three Tragedies of Political Violence." Although both columns were reactions to the shooting at the Trump rally this past weekend, we did not coordinate our columns, nor did either of us even know that the other was writing a column today
The common theme in both columns is to sound notes of caution about what people are already saying with great confidence about what happened and the lessons to be learned. We both mention the 1981 assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan to highlight that politicians can be targeted for nonpolitical reasons. Professor Dorf spends most of his time responding to the notion that political violence "never works," noting that of course it sometimes does (and making clear that it is still bad). I point out (as the third "tragedy" mentioned in the title of my piece) that we already know that people will never agree about what happened or why, no matter how much seemingly clear-cut evidence might be gathered. The political discussion in the US is too broken ever to reach consensus at this point.
Professor Dorf has no current plans to write further on that topic, while I mention in my column that I have a planned followup column set for this Thursday, where I will directly address what we do and (mostly) do not know about Saturday's shooting.
Here, I want to follow the lead of Senator Bernie Sanders, who argued on Sunday morning that politics should be boring. In today's Verdict column, I explain why he is right that politics should be about difficult policy issues like health care and income inequality. Although I agreed with him, I set aside those policy questions for discussion at another time and place.
That time is now, and that place is here. Sanders wants politics to be boring? I'm just the guy to do it! Who better than an economist and tax professor to make politics boring again?
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One of the mom-and-apple-pie values that American politicians like to talk about is independence, as in "standing on your own two feet, proudly not in need of anyone else's help." This is a bipartisan notion that is rarely examined in any detail, but in fact it is in deep tension with the very notion of living in a society with other human beings. Back in 2012, for example, then-President Barack Obama correctly informed business owners of something that they most definitely did not want to hear: "You didn't build that."
What Obama meant -- and what he said very clearly before and after uttering those four words -- is that we all depend on things that other people have built. The internet (financed by government money), your favorite teacher, roads and bridges, and so on are all the result of collaborative enterprises. Indeed, he finished that part of his speech with this: "The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together." That is, even in real time, Obama did not say that individual initiative is nothing. He said that it is not everything and that working together is part of living in a successful society and economy.
The Republican freakout that ensued -- and I do mean that they freaked out, building their entire national convention around their deliberate misrepresentation of what Obama had said -- obviously did not stop Obama from being reelected that year. That does not, of course, mean that people understood that Republicans were lying or that they agreed with Obama. For all we know, most people did not know or care about that insider pseudo-gaffe.
Even so, American continue to be attracted to the notion of being independent, which means that they are a receptive audience for those who would tell them who is virtuous and who is wicked -- "dependency" being not only presumptively bad but often characterized as a social ill requiring tough love. For example, encyclopedia.com's entry on "Personal Dependency" notes that some social scientists describe "[d]ependency-related beliefs [that] include the perception of the self as weak, helpless, and ineffectual." In its most clinical form, this could simply mean that there are extremes of depending on others to which healthy people do not go, making a diagnosis of dependency a matter of determining how much is too much -- not that it is possible or desirable to be fully independent of others. The problem is that this is translated into political discussions without any nuance: independence good, dependence bad.
I bring all of this up because I was contacted a few months ago by a writer for a publication called WalletHub, who included in his email some questions for me to answer as an academic expert. I was somewhat familiar with that site, but I had only seen it as the kind of place where one could get perfectly good advice about matters of personal finance (hence the name): mortgage strategies, stock tips, and so on. I did not think of it as the kind of publication that would ask me about my policy views, given that I had no reason to think of them as being policy-oriented or political in any partisan sense. How-to finance sites tend to have a markets-rah-rah tilt, but not in any deep or ideological sense. In any case, I could not imagine why my online profile would have caused them to contact me.
I was pleasantly surprised, however, when I continued to read the email, which listed six specific questions that I might address. Some of them fit within my expectations of the kinds of questions that WalletHub would ask ("What tips do you have for a person that wishes to increase his/her financial independence? What are some first steps?" and "With only 45% of young adults being financially independent, what are some of the best ways parents can prepare their children to be financially independent in their adult life?"), and if all of the questions had been in that vein, I would not have bothered to reply. That is not to say that I do not have something to contribute to understanding those topics, but they are hardly the main focus of my professional work.
What caught my attention were the first and last questions on the list: "Is it fair that some states are more dependent on the Federal Government than others?" and "Should states try to make their economies more or less dependent on international trade? How?" Interesting! The reporter explained that he was working on a piece to determine the "Most & Least Independent States." Although that seemed like a pointless exercise, I was intrigued enough by the two good questions that I decided to respond. The final version of my comments (which, to the reporter's credit, were not in any way altered from what I submitted) were included in the final story that was published on June 25, 2024.
It turned out that WalletHub has an "Ask the Experts" section for their columns (or at least for this one), and I noted that two of the other experts (whose fields of expertise are very different from mine) offered very much the same answer that I did to the first question about whether it is fair that some states are more dependent on the federal government than other states are. (The other expert did not answer that question.) My answer began: "It is not only fair, it is inevitable." I then explained why it makes no sense to imagine that every state would send in exactly as many dollars to the federal government as it receives in return. The federal government deals with matters that are national, and arbitrary state lines mean nothing in that context.
To be clear, as a matter of liberal-versus-conservative partisanship, a Democrat like me should be drawn to the idea that there is something unfair about the way the central government redistributes resources. After all, it is well known that blue states tend to be wealthier and therefore are net payers whereas red states are often much poorer and are thus net recipients. Even so, I am not aware of any liberal or Democrat who argues that states should be net-zero when it comes to the federal govenrment. We only wish that Republicans would stop being such hypocrites about it. But in any event, having a question included on the "most and least independent states" survey asking whether it was fair even to have a federal government -- which is what this question in fact amounts to -- was surprising. That is simply not a meaningful issue.
Similarly, I was a bit confused about the last question, which asked whether states should make efforts not to depend on foreign trade. My response began with this: "No, states should not deliberately set out to make themselves more or less dependent on international trade. If a new business wants to move into your state from Oregon or British Columbia, it should make no difference that one is a US company and the other is based in Canada." What is especially odd, however, is the notion that a state is being "independent" when it relies on investments from domestic companies from other states but "dependent" if its outside investors prefer maple syrup on their Timbits.
On the larger point of states being independent, it is fairly clear that this website was doing what such websites often do: come up with a listicle to generate clicks. People supposedly see a "which states are more or less ____" list and think to themselves: "Ooh, where does my state rank?" If USNews can mutate from a news magazine into a profitable list-monger that pretends to know how to measure and rank the "best" colleges, law schools, and so on, why not try to rank states for something squishy like independence?
To their credit, the people who created the listicle to which I contributed did include a transparent description of their methodology. The problem is that the list of factors that they aggregated into each state's overall score (and thus ranking) is such a mishmash that it makes the USNews rankings look coherent. The methodology explanation begins with this: "In order to determine the most independent states, WalletHub compared the 50 states across five key dimensions: 1) Financial Dependency, 2) Government Dependency, 3) Job-Market Dependency, 4) International-Trade Dependency and 5) Vice Dependency."
Again, there is no logic behind the idea that a state is more independent if it shuns foreign investment (which is part of what they call dimension 4), but what in the world is "vice dependency" (dimension 5)? It turns out that this includes "Share of Adult [illicit] Drug Users" and "Share of Adults with Gambling Disorders," which I sort of understand as a matter of independence (except that those things are illnesses, not personal failings), but also "Share of Social-Network Users" and "Median Daily Time Spent Watching TV." These factors are all being used, I hasten to remind you, to numerically rank states' "vice dependency."
Notably, the vice "dimension" includes "Share of Population Spending More than They Earn," while the financial dependency dimension includes "Share of Seriously Underwater Mortgages," "Foreclosure Rate," and "Bankruptcy Rate," all three of which would tend to include people spending more than they earn. And I was also disappointed to see that the "Federal Dependence" measure that I mentioned above is given "Quadruple Weight" in measuring the Government Dependency dimension.
At the top of the piece, after a teaser list of the top 5 states, we see this summary from someone identified as a WalletHub analyst (who is not the reporter with whom I interacted): "As we celebrate America’s independence day, it’s also worth taking time to recognize the individual states that have the most independent qualities as well. Utah and Colorado are the most independent in 2024, according to our analysis, and residents display their independence in a variety of ways, from not being reliant on state- or federally-provided benefits to saving money for the future and not being addicted to gambling, alcohol or drugs."
Does the phrase "you get what you pay for" mean anything? Not being dependent on federal benefits means, among other things, refusing the Medicaid expansion, which has been a disaster for red states. My former home of Florida ended up in the 3 slot. Why? Among other things, "Florida residents are doing pretty well financially," with low unemployment, high job growth, and low mortgage delinquency. All of those things are predictable in a state with large numbers of old people (who are collecting federal retirement benefits).
But the most jaw-dropping aspect of the methodology is that having an early "tax freedom day" is considered a big a plus. That is, states that provide few benefits and collect few taxes are "independent," but states that actually take care of their own citizens (through state funding, not federal funding) are "dependent." The entire notion of a "tax freedom day" is infamously a conservative public-relations ploy that has somehow caught on in the mainstream press over the years. The idea is that people are "free" of paying taxes on a specific day of the year, which depends on how much money the state's government collects.
Again, you get what you pay for, and even if one believes that "tax freedom" is a meaningful concept, a state could very well collect a lot in taxes and give it back to its citizens without redistributing any of it, because the state govenrment could provide things that are useful to everyone (parks, crime reduction programs, and so on). It is no surprise, however, that Florida's write-up starts with this: "Florida is the third-most independent state, with one of the earliest 'tax freedom days' in the country."
In the end, this is more amusing than troubling, because it is obvious that the ranking is an unserious effort to grab eyeballs. Sure enough, shortly after the list was published, a small newspaper in California (the Coachella Valley, specifically) excitedly announced that "California is Among 15 Most Independent States." Notably, California's relatively high (by WalletHub's measure) independence score was entirely driven by its being a net payer into the federal government -- that is, that it is a one of those rich blue states.
In any case, we are apparently supposed to believe that independence is good, and more independence is better. A state where people depend on opioids and another state with a large number of federal, state, and local government employees are both dependent states. There is no way to assess how people and states interact with each other or how the benefits of spending and debt can sometimes justify the costs. But hey, I once lived in Massachusetts, and it ranked #4. Woooo!
Sorry if this was a little less boring than I intended. But at least it was a respite from the news.