#1. California, 53.
53/435 = 12% of the entire USA. California is a giant. It's the most important state in the country. That California is majority minority, has terrible education scores, always votes democrat, and can never balance its budget is bad for the entire USA. Our future is blighted by California's downward direction. If they just took some common sense measures like deporting illegal immigrants instead of giving them all sorts of government benefits, they could chase out the ne'er do wells and give their state a healthy business and family environment once again. America has always leaned on California as the center of innovation and progress, and some of those proud institutions remain in the form of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Stanford and Berkeley. Innovative companies like SpaceX, Blizzard, and Intel are all based in California and are some of the reasons America continues to produce such high-value-added goods well up the economic food chain. I suspect America will need to massively bail out California due to its current and past policy mistakes, but I think that's only fair considering how much California has done economically for America in the past. We shouldn't turn our backs and show ingratitude to the state that's been our engine for decades. Maybe the bailouts can come with strings attached on how they must cut spending and balance their budgets once and for all.
#2. Texas, 36. Texas is a good deal smaller than California, but the second biggest and most important state in the USA. Texas has its own problems, including being majority minority with the expectable results of only doing so-so on education, health care, crime, employment and other measurements. But our gaining 4 new Congressional seats shows how dramatically gung-ho Texas is compared to the rest of the nation despite all that. We gained twice as many seats this Census as any other state. A lot of this is from Mexicans coming across the border, but I suspect just as much comes from Americans from all across the country moving here with a 'gone to Texas' sign on their old front doors. We are the land of opportunity now. We are the economically freest large state in the country and NAFTA has generated massive windfalls in economic growth for Texas, which lies at the heart of the free trade zone. Due to our deeply-rooted conservatism, the national Republican party has managed to stay alive against the monolith of California's 55 electoral votes that always go to the Democratic presidential candidate. California and Texas are like bizarro versions of each other, sharing many similarities but still turning out completely different. We are the two poles the country swings around.
#3. Florida and New York, 27. Remember when New York used to matter? Well, it still matters just a little. Losing two seats, it now ties for third with Florida, which gained two seats this Census. Florida is another beneficiary of massive Hispanic immigration, but that isn't a fully satisfying explanation. New York is still a magnet for immigrants as well, New York City is known for its diverse immigrant population. One has to conclude that New York's liberal government and policies have been driving businesses and families away as they seek better opportunities elsewhere around the country. Florida meanwhile has had a Republican government for a long time now and continues to grow and benefit from the political direction it has taken. No doubt New York, as the financial capitol of the USA, is more 'important' than Florida in some abstract sense for America's greatness and glory, but the unbearable length of time it has taken for anything to be built on the ground zero site, the maddeningly sleazy acts of bankers and financiers like Berny Madoff in this latest recession, and the decline in relevance of cultural institutions like Broadway all paint New York in a negative, declining light. Even if all Florida offers our country is oranges, beaches and retirement homes, at least they aren't actively trying to destroy the entire economic fabric of the world like New York managed to do.
Compare One World Trade Center to the Burj Khalifa and you'll see why thinking about New York causes such melancholy:
Burj Khalifa (Arabic: برج خليفة "Khalifa Tower"),[8] known as Burj Dubai prior to its inauguration, is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and the tallest man-made structure ever built, at 828 m (2,717 ft).[8] Construction began on 21 September 2004, with the exterior of the structure completed on 1 October 2009. The building officially opened on 4 January 2010,[1][9] and is part of the new 2 km2 (490-acre) flagship development called Downtown Dubai at the 'First Interchange' along Sheikh Zayed Road, near Dubai's main business district.
One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower[5] by then New York Governor George Pataki, is the main building of the new World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan in New York City, New York. The tower will be located in the northwest corner of the 16-acre (65,000 m²) World Trade Center site bounded by Vesey, West, Washington and Fulton streets.[6] Construction on below-ground utility relocations, footings, and foundations for the building began on April 27, 2006.[7][8][9] On March 30, 2009, the Port Authority said that the building will be known as 'One World Trade Center', replacing its former name 'Freedom Tower'.[5] Upon completion, One World Trade Center will be the tallest building in the United States, standing at a height of 1,776 feet (541.32 m), and among the tallest buildings in the world.[10][11]
The symbolic cornerstone of One World Trade Center was laid down in a ceremony on July 4, 2004,[39] but further construction of the tower was stalled until 2006
One WTC was originally expected to be completed and opened by 2011,[80][81] however, an October 2008 report by the PANY pushed back the estimated completion of the tower to some time between the second and fourth quarter of 2013, with the total estimated budget growing slightly from the 2007 estimate to $3.1 billion.[1]
If New York truly were a great state, it would not take them 12 years to build a new tower that's smaller than the Burj Khalifa, which was built in just 6 years.
Here's what our most important building in America, as an iconic stand against terror and for the indomitable, dauntless, triumphant and free spirit of Americans looks like today:
By the way, renaming it from the Freedom Tower, which would have meant something, to the ultra-liberal 'One-World happy clappy politically correct tolerant hand-holding care-bear Trade Center', is another symbolic example of how awful and vomit-inducing New York as a state and people have become.
Institutions like the UN, the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, the New York Times, the Smithsonian (with its continuous modern art and gay sex exhibits), and everything else based out of New York are bad for America and completely alienated from normal American interests and values that the rest of the country shares. Thankfully Florida's 27 electoral votes can cancel out New York's 27, which always go Democratic these days.
#5. Illinois and Pennsylvania, 18. The midwest is continuing to decline and lose seats compared to the South and West, but remains a heavily populated corner of our country. I'm not really sure what Illinois and Pennsylvania do for a living, or what their impact on the rest of the country is. They tend to be middle of the road states that vote equal parts Republican and Democrat.
#7. Ohio, 16. Another declining midwestern state that's innocuously middle of the road. It lost two seats this Census but remains the 7th biggest state in the Union. It has a lot of corporate headquarters and farmers, and a good football team, so it can't be all bad.
#8. Michigan, Georgia, 14. Here's an interesting storyline. Michigan lost seats while Georgia gained seats, just like New York and Florida, so that now they are equally important to the country. Michigan suffers from a fading manufacturing industry which leaves too many people there unemployed, but it has aggravated its problems through liberal politics and catering to unions. Because the South doesn't haven unions, we can pay competitive wages where companies can make cars and the like while still making a profit. This is why Georgia is now as big as Michigan. Georgia has an excellent university in Georgia Tech, which is at the forefront of technical expertise in the nation. Georgia's women are beautiful and well-mannered, truly earning the title of 'peaches.' I can't say enough good things about Georgia. Michigan, meanwhile, is where feral blacks roam the zombie city of Detroit, which has suffered more cataclysmic destruction than Hiroshima through the sheer vibrancy of its diversity.
Detroit:
Hiroshima:
Michigan also houses that awful city of Flint, where some innocent white boys and girls were raped and murdered by feral blacks just for getting off at the wrong train station during their ill-fated joy ride. Like the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, I see no reason to ever forget or forgive this awful, hateful, senseless crime against such completely innocent children with their whole lives ahead of them.
#10. North Carolina, 13. I bet you weren't expecting this to be the tenth largest and most important state in our Union. I know I wasn't. It has no historical significance and never comes up in day to day political discussions. I hear North Carolina is the most beautiful state in the country, and it's a decidedly conservative and southern state, which is always good, but I don't know much about it other than its historical tobacco and textile trades. I can't think of any North Carolina cities being important commercial or cultural hubs. I wonder how they ended up housing so many people?
The top ten states of the country together take up 54% of the country's population/House seats. Most of America has already been canvassed just by looking at the states mentioned above. This means we can treat the remaining states with a little less respect and attention. Let's start grouping states into larger categories from here:
Holding 8-12 electoral votes: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Arizona, Missouri, Indiana, and Tennessee.
Excepting New Jersey, this is a high quality slice of the American pie. Here we have a lot of liberal but successful, intelligent, and peaceful states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Washington. We have some go-getters like the rapidly expanding Arizona and the tiny-but-heavy-punching in college and business quality Indiana. We have the old and proud South in Virginia, Missouri, Maryland, and Tennessee. And we have our nation's origin in Massachusetts, which is still rich and productive to this day. MIT is based out of Massachusetts and publishes Technology Review (many times inventing the technology it then goes and reports on), and its one of my favorite institutions in America. Magic the Gathering is based out of Seattle, Washington. Together these states compose 101/435 = 23% of the population/congressional seats.
Holding 3-8 electoral votes: Connecticut, Oregon, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Alabama.
These states also tend to be cool. They are often poor and backwards, but full of good and productive people none the less. Connecticut and Oregon are liberal, but the same type of well meaning and well educated liberals you see in Minnesota or Washington. They don't impair their state's quality of life at all. The farming states and the old south are all well represented here, all of which screams 'America' to me. Utah is the home of the mormons, the best behaved people in America, and maybe our brightest hope for the future. Nevada is a boom state trying to live off the ever-treacherous tourist trade. Colorado is the most beautiful state in the Union and can rely on its tourism, high tech industries, transportation hub status, regional capital status, and everything in-between to remain the nicest place to live in the country. One of the reasons we can't afford to lose the United States is that Texans need to be able to visit North Carolina, Arizona, Colorado, California, and Oregon simply because they're so beautiful. Not to mention Montana, New Mexico, Florida, and practically everywhere else in our great country. A song comes to mind which already stressed how useful it is for our country to be one united whole:
'O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!'
Together these smaller states are 81/435 19% of the population/congressional seats.
1-2 Electoral Seats: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
These states are generally nice places to live, but more tragic than inspirational. Rhode Island and Delaware aren't much smaller than Maryland in land area, but are far less populated, even though they are older colonies. The same is true of New Hampshire and Vermont. Why were these states never really settled? What's wrong with them? But the remaining states are even worse. Alaska is enormous and has tons of natural resources, but is just a frozen desert where no one wants to live. Canada, which is just as far north, has made a much better country with much larger cities than anything Alaska can claim. Hawaii is a tropical paradise but still largely empty. Maine borders the Atlantic and is right next to many big cities, but is totally empty. The only good thing about Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota is that they are so empty any enterprising movement could move into this contiguous land mass, take it over, populate it, secede from the union, and become one of the largest and strongest nations in the world at will. It would only take a million dedicated people to get the ball rolling. In a way, their complete failure as states to properly exist is an asset for future Americans, who could 'emigrate' to a virgin frontier whenever the current America becomes insupportable. But this is no excuse for their wasting of such valuable land. If we plead before God and the dense masses of Bangladesh and Yemen why we had so much uncultivated, unsettled, untouched land I'm not sure what we could really say in our defense. "We ran out of pioneers?" "There wasn't any gold there?" "It was too cold?" Montana especially is an insult to the world. There's no reason it couldn't have at least as many people as Minnesota which is right next to it and just as far north. I give all of these states an F. If we could conquer the malarial swamps of the South and the mojave desert of the Southwest, turning them into successful states with teeming millions, we can conquer the cold of our empty quarter. It just takes some gumption, something noticeably lacking in those regions. It reminds me of New York's inability to build one damn skyscraper in ten years.
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