Romney Economic Plan Hurts Red States, Helps Wealthy Urbanites, While Obama Boosts Rural Areas
Source: The Nation
According to a new analysis of tax and census data, Mitt Romney's economic plan is heavily tilted towards big cities, but tough on the rural areas that comprise the GOP's base. Barack Obama's economic proposals lean the other way, offering little to wealthy urbanites while delivering broad tax savings to the middle and lower class Americans spread across the South and Midwest.
The findings, released Thursday by a start-up called Politify, present a novel way to view the diverging economic promises in this recession election. In a race dominated by the rhetoric of deficits and the 99 percent, Politify says it offers unassailable data and objective answers for voters wondering how the candidates' plans will affect their wallet, their neighborhood, or the whole country.
The most dramatic image -- which organizers believe will spread quickly online -- provides a geographic model of how the candidates' plans for taxes and benefits will impact individual households. All the data is from the IRS and a US census survey. Nikita Bier, Politify's founder, says this is the most granular model of campaign policy impact ever created. After he first ran the numbers, Bier recalls that he was "shocked" to see just how severely the results favored Obama's plan:
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Still, Frank found the national visualization "remarkable," given its "inversion of the old Red State/Blue State maps of the last decade – apparently showing that people are voting almost entirely against their economic interests." And while conservatives living in "an electronic world of their own" can brush off the analysis, Frank said the data could prove useful to reporters and open-minded voters alike.
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Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/169528/report-romney-economic-plan-hurts-red-states-helps-wealthy-urbanites-while-obama-boosts-#
Frank is journalist Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas.
Editing to add the link to the Politify website:
http://www.politify.com/
The Local tab there is the one that brings up the interactive map:
http://www.politify.com/election/local
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