America's strange diversity

POST: Is Part of the United States in the Third World?, The Map Scroll, May 5, 2009

Anybody who's lived and traveled extensively around America and the world won't find this listing surprising. In fact, the "comparables" according to list proximity are often quite poetically matched.

Ah, but America is completely homogeneous, signaling the homogenizing future that is globalization.

Or maybe it's a multinational union where strange amounts of diversity persist!

Comments

[large]

An observation . . ALL, with the exception of Alaska, of the dark green states, while being the highest on the HDI are also the deepest in debt and are having definite problems with meeting and balancing their individual state budgets.

[stuart abrams]

This is interesting to compare to the EU. Countries like Germany and France opposed stimulus programs, in large part because they have their own safety nets which they say makes a stimulus program unnecessary. That's great for them, but what about the poorer parts of the EU - Ireland, Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe. I don't see any of those enlightened "socialistic" Scandinavians lining up to ship their tax money to Bulgaria. But in essence, that's exactly what happens in the US. The wealthier states essentially channel Federal tax dollars to the poorer states, which benefit greatly from programs such as the stimulus program, i.e., the poor states contribute less in taxes but get more in return. The irony is that the ideologues in America's Gap are the ones who are fighting this. Anyway, it's a good illustration of the weakness of the EU structure as compared to the US constitution.