Parts of the country with strong economic growth. Conspicuously absent are any "blue" states.
Give me a break. First of all, red states are also the poorest in the country, with the worst public education systems and with the largest pockets of pollution. Some of them are indeed showing good growth, in part because they had so far to go. Second, some of the examples given are far from "red" areas--Austin may be in a red state that is lax on regulation and tolerates whatever pollution its O&G folk want to spit out (see, for example, "Weighing pollution against prosperity," dallasnews.com ), but Austin itself is a blue oasis within that red. Plus, high energy prices has helped Texas a wee bit--I daresay at least as much if not more than this "pro-business" environment. Then they give 3 examples of the "New Silicon Valleys." Well, two of them--Raleigh-Durham in NC and Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax counties in VA are indeed in states that have been mostly red in the past couple of decades--but those areas are both bastions of blueness in those red states. And while those states have indeed been fairly red in the recent past, they are turning purple as time goes by--in good part due to the fact that the highly educated workers that are coming into those areas tend to be Democrats. The last example is Utah, and I will grant that that is as red a state as you will find. |
