A Red-Blue Terror Alert
The New York Times
April 1, 2003
By PAUL KRUGMAN
As recriminations fly over Operation Predicted Cakewalk,
some commentators look back wistfully to the early post-Sept. 11 era, when - or
so they imagine - the nation stood united against the terrorist threat.
On my beat, that era was brief indeed: less than 48 hours after
the atrocity, Congressional Republicans tried to exploit
the event to pass a cut in the capital gains tax. But on national security issues, there
was at first some real bipartisanship.
What happened to that bipartisanship? It fell prey to two
enduring prejudices of the right: its deep hostility to nonmilitary government
spending, and its exaltation of the "heartland" over the great urban states.
You might have expected the events of Sept. 11 to temper
the right's opposition to some kinds of domestic spending.
After thousands of Americans were killed by men armed only
with box cutters, surely everyone would acknowledge that national
security involves more than
mere military might. But you would have been wrong.
In a remarkable recent
article titled "The 9/10 President," Jonathan Chait of The New
Republic documents how the Bush administration has
systematically neglected homeland security since 9/11.
In its effort to keep spending
down, the administration has repeatedly blocked proposals
to enhance security at potential domestic targets like ports
and nuclear plants.
What Mr. Chait doesn't point out is the extent to which
already inadequate antiterrorism spending has been
focused on the parts of the
country that need it least.
I've written before about the myth of the heartland - roughly
speaking, the "red states," which voted
for George W. Bush in the 2000 election,
as opposed to the "blue states," which voted
for Al Gore. The nation's interior is supposedly a place
of rugged individualists, unlike the
spongers and whiners along the coasts. In reality, of course,
rural states are heavily subsidized by urban states. New Jersey pays about $1.50
in federal taxes for every dollar it gets in return; Montana receives
about $1.75 in federal spending for every dollar it pays in taxes.
Any sensible program of spending on homeland security would
at least partly redress this balance. The most natural targets for terrorism lie
in or near great metropolitan areas; surely protecting those areas
is the highest priority, right?
Apparently not. Even in the first months after Sept. 11, Republican
lawmakers made it clear that they would not support any major effort to
rebuild or even secure New York. And now that anti-urban prejudice
has taken statistical form: under the formula the Department of
Homeland Security has adopted for handing out money,
it spends 7 times as much protecting each resident of Wyoming
as it does protecting each resident of New York.
Here's how it works. In its main grant programs, the department
makes no attempt to assess needs. Instead, each state receives a base of 0.75
percent of the total, regardless of its population; the rest is then allocated
in proportion to population. This is a very good deal for states with
small populations, like Wyoming or Montana. It's a very bad deal
for states like California or New York, which receives only 4.7 percent of the
money. And since New York and other big urban states remain
the most likely targets of another major attack, it's a very bad deal for the
country.
Why adopt such a strange formula? Well, maybe it's not that strange:
what it most resembles is the Electoral College, which also gives
disproportionate weight (though not that disproportionate) to states
with small populations. And with a few exceptions, small-population
states are red states - indeed, the small-state bias of the Electoral
College is what allowed Mr. Bush to claim the White House despite losing
the popular vote. It's hard not to suspect that the formula - which makes
absolutely no sense in terms of national security - was adopted
precisely because it caters to that same constituency.
(To be fair, there's one big "red state" loser from the formula: Texas. But one of these
days, sooner than most people think, Texas may well turn blue.)
In other words, the allocation of money confirms Mr. Chait's point:
even in a time of war - a war that seems oddly unrelated to the terrorist
threat - the Bush administration isn't serious about protecting the homeland.
Instead, it continues to subordinate U.S. security needs to its
unchanged political agenda.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times
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