The shots, they have been fired.

“It’s not the time to be saying 'Well you put in a dollar more than I did, or I put in $5 more than you did.' … But if you want to go to who’s getting bailed out and who paid what, nobody would be bailing out New York state...New York state has been bailing them out every year for decades. If you want to do an analysis of who is a giver and who is a taker, we are the number one giver...Who are the taker states? Kentucky, southeast part of the country...It's not about money, but if you want to make it about money, you're making a mistake because you're going to lose on a tally sheet. And it’s not even going to be close.”



That was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday, responding to the lunatic notion that the states that contribute more tax money than they accept should go bankrupt rather than be bailed out in the current emergency because they are somehow “poorly run.” Mitch McConnell broached the notion last week, and the president* had tweeted himself aboard the bandwagon earlier Monday morning. (In keeping with his administration*’s flea-on-a-griddle commitment to anything, the president* previously had expressed his desire to have state bailout money included in the most recent emergency legislation.)

Cuomo has been unsparing in his dealings with the Senate Majority Leader. < Getty Images

Clearly, as we have seen with the distribution of critical medical supplies, there is a conscious attempt to politicize all measures to alleviate the pandemic prior to November’s election. McConnell is so deeply committed to that idea that he appears to have convinced himself that public-sector pensions in so-called blue states are at root of the pandemic-related fiscal catastrophe, and this appears to have convinced him that no states need be bailed out. And what does McConnell think is going to happen to states that rely on sales taxes or extraction taxes now that nobody’s shopping anywhere and oil is selling at Dollar Store prices?

As Paul Krugman pointed out in the NYT, McConnell’s political blinders have led him into a cul-de-sac of absurdity.



Oh, and the idea that this is specifically a blue state problem is ludicrous. Fiscal crises are looming all across America, from Florida to Kansas to Texas— hit especially hard by crashing oil prices — to, yes, McConnell’s home state, Kentucky. And if states and local governments are forced into sharp budget cuts, the effect will be to deepen the economic slump — which would be bad for Donald Trump and could cost Republicans the Senate.



Worse, of course, is the fact that forcing this issue into discussion on purely partisan terms is to invite governors like Cuomo to point out the very inconvenient truth that many of the so-called red states are freeloading off states like New York and New Jersey, taking more federal tax largesse from their sisters than they kick in. That’s a recipe for even more disunion at a time when the one thing we don’t need is more of that. Cuomo was correct in slapping back at Washington Republicans, who have become adept at pulling the temple down on their own heads.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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