As someone said, move to a red state if you want a more affordable lifestyle.  Maybe that’s too simplistic, but there is something to the idea that living in a blue area does not bring you a good return on your investment, i.e. taxes.  Let’s check this from Fareed Zakaria:

If America has an affordability crisis, it tends to be in places Democrats govern, like New York, Illinois and California, which all feature high taxes, soaring housing costs and stagnant outcomes in basic areas like education and infrastructure.

Consider New York City, the country’s largest and most important metropolis. The mayor-elect wants to spend more money on shiny new programs, but surely it would be worth first asking what happened to the money already raised?

In 2012, toward the end of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty, the city’s budget was about $65 billion. Today it is about $116 billion, an increase of more than 75 percent in just over a decade. Spending has soared while the subway deteriorates. Housing costs rise and public schools remain mediocre despite spending more than $36,000 per pupil last year, the highest in the nation among major school districts.

The result is a paradox that defines much of blue state America. Government that promises more costs more, but delivers less. New York state mirrors the city. Its spending has risen from roughly $70 billion in 2000 to more than $230 billion today, about twice Florida’s budget even though Florida has several million more residents. When voters see that record, they conclude, not unreasonably, that more money is not the answer.

Yet Democrats’ instinctive response to every problem remains the same – spend more. The truth is that local government in the U.S. is already living on borrowed time. For decades, states and cities have traded short-term political harmony for long-term fiscal ruin. To keep peace with powerful public sector unions, they promise ever more lavish pensions and benefits, then quietly defer the bill to future taxpayers.

Across America these obligations act like slow motion fiscal time bombs. Invisible for now, but guaranteed to explode.

And explode they will, which may be one of the reasons why more and more taxpayers are changing from blue to red zip codes.

Mr. Zakaria makes a wonderful point.  The Democrats make promises, raise taxes, and then the trains are never on time.  The bureaucracy turns into an employer and voting bloc rather than a business of serving the voters who fund it.  The public schools are the best example of everything that is wrong with “blue governance.”

Kids can’t do math or read, but the bureaucracy grows and grows.  The police have a knife in their back and can’t fight crime without getting thrown into some kind of investigation.

So the blue areas can’t teach our children, can’t stand behind their law enforcement officers, can’t run the trains on time, but keep proposing larger tax increases, as we see in Chicago.

The model is failing, and it’s nice to see Mr. Zakaria point this out.

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Image from Grok.