California IS the United States, You Sick Silly Fools
Following the recent spate of fires that devastated large swaths of Los Angeles, there was an outpouring of support from people around the country. There were also analyses made by pragmatic folks who pointed out that the fires had been inevitable thanks to the conditions of the climate crisis and that, frankly, the area shouldn’t have been “developed” the way that it was and that people shouldn’t have been continuing to live there, at least not in the numbers they were. Then, there were those who felt the need to express entirely unhelpful opinions and be malignant dickheads.
Prominent among these dickheads were Republican politicians who blamed California’s
Democratic politicians for poor management and response, and opined that the state should not be given any federal funds or assistance. In addition to being incredibly callous, cruel, and politically opportunistic, these bellends are very stupid. Where exactly do they think federal funds come from? Federal tax revenue is contributed by each state, and which state contributes more than any other in the Union? Of course it’s fucking California. By a wide margin, California residents and businesses pay more than any other state, more than many of them combined.
The fact that they think they have the right to withhold federal funds based on political bias is also incredibly arrogant. Often, these walking and taking penisfaces represent states that contribute the least to the federal budget. Their states would cease to function if not for federal aid. Yet they think they have the right to withhold money, much of which came from California, from being used to help the state’s people after they’ve survived a disaster. While true that California receives more federal aid than other states, it is a fraction of the money that it contributes. Giving California funds to aid with recovery efforts would essentially just be giving them a portion of their money back. It’s like they paid a high deductible insurance policy and are now entitled to make a claim.
Some political beings cursed with having phalluses for heads, including the dickheaded turd who is currently and very unfortunately our president, have suggested that it should be “up to the states” to deal with and pay for their own disaster recovery. It would be interesting to see how many states, without California’s massive economy, manage this. How well are states like Alabama and Mississippi going to fare when they’re hit by disaster? If states were left alone to their own devices when hit by fires, storms, floods, or what have you, California would be among the few that actually could support itself.
If the state was pushed and sufficiently pissed off, and was driven to cut its federal revenue contributions, because why should it pay into a fund that it’s capriciously excluded from, much of the rest of the country would go to hell. The point of having a federal system, with shared revenue amongst the states, is that the stronger states help support the weaker ones. Trying to bully the strongest state, the fifth largest economy in the world, is asinine.
If this was all more than pathetic political posturing, and the red state cock-domed cabal did in fact hang California out to dry, or smolder, then the state should honestly just secede. For all its flaws, if we’re being honest, California is better than everywhere else in the country by most metrics. As an independent nation, it wouldn’t be the most powerful, but better than most, and would probably improve once extricating itself from its increasingly backwards neighbor. It would make a fine country.