Socialism?

I put together the table below during the election campaign to show the Republican's hypocrisy at calling now-President Obama a "socialist" and implying that his entire economic agenda was to "spread the wealth around," when they themselves were the beneficiaries of Bush's spreading the wealth around over the previous 8 years. What it shows is the ratio between federal spending and taxes paid per state for 2005, according to the census data and compiled by The Tax Foundation (I added the color coding of green being net beneficiaries of a progressive tax code and red being the net contributors), and how that state voted in the 2004 and 2008 elections.

As the debate over a strong public option rages in Congress and Republicans (or conservative Democrats) again use phrases like "government take-over" and "socialized medicine," check to see what state they are from. Odds are, if it's coming from a Republican, they couldn't be more hypocritical of what government can do.

The picture above comes from Nate Silver's blog, FiveThirtyEight, and shows the relationship between Support for the Public Option and Insurance PAC Fundraising, further broken down by party affiliation. His graph came from some comprehensive, proprietary number crunching but he isn't usually that far off.

It's a sad commentary on our political system and an should be seen as an urgent call for campaign finance reform.