https://twitter.com/NotMikeDitka89/status/1328410360563474432
Also love how they jump right to assuming I am a right winger because I am disputing their dumb ass take.
https://twitter.com/NotMikeDitka89/status/1328410360563474432
Also love how they jump right to assuming I am a right winger because I am disputing their dumb ass take.
Awful take. For starters, GOP-dominated counties tend to have smaller populations, which means less available labor to exploit for profit, and fewer jobs - of fucking course their GDPs are going to be smaller! What is even the point of looking at aggregate GDP (which corresponds to local capitalist profits more than anything worker-related with the post-1970s wage-productivity divergence), and then drawing a conclusion about the work ethic of the average person in each county? This person isn’t even citing per capita data, which would control for the fact that there are just more people in the dense urban counties where, of course, Dems tend to do better!
(Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1138/)
If they wanted to make a point like “Republican voters don’t work”, they should have looked at unemployment insurance claims by county, or any of the U3, U6, or labor force participation rate. Most of these data should be available from the BLS.
Regarding the Brookings Institute article that produced this infographic, which has its own different problems, they use this statistic to comment on the same old portrait of a rural-urban economic divide manifesting in divergent propensities to support different parties, aka shit we knew already (with some classic conflation between Dems/libs and the left-leaning voters they hold hostage):
I approve of the weaponised [sic]ing