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I was reading an article a long time ago about a movement in Western Kansas to break away from the Eastern part of the state. The reasoning was because the Western parts of the State got something like .50 cents back for every dollar it paid in taxes. According to this article most people in Kansas lived in the Eastern part of the state but there was a lot of mineral wealth in the western part of the state. Things have probably changed but I thought the article was fascinating at the time.
Some states have regions with very different cultures. Example I live in Pennsylvania and Western/Central Pennsylvania is very different then Eastern Pennsylvania. Eastern Pennsylvania resembles Maryland/New Jersey or even New York. It is very fast paced, liberal and tends to be white collar. Central Pennsylvania is a lot like West Virginia very rural, slow moving, conservative and has a lot of German and Scots-Irish people. Pittsburgh and the rest of Western Pennsylvania is a lot like the Mid West blue collar, conservative, union leaning and has a lot of ethnic East and South Europeans (I know that I'm over generalizing so please don't point out the obvious). I have lived in all 3 sections and trust me they are very different.
The State Politicians tend to focus on the Eastern part of the state and don't give much attention to the rest of the state. Sometimes people in the Eastern part of the state refer to Harrisburg as Western Pennsylvania. In Pa it kind of works out because Central and Western Pennsylvania keeps the state from becoming too liberal while the Eastern part of the state keeps it from becoming too conservative. Still I think the needs of Central/Western Pa would be better served if all of PA west of the Susquehanna became it's own state. It could be the State of Western Pennsylvania.
What other places would be better off becoming it’s own states? No right or wrong answer just your opinion based on what you have observed.
California for sure. Its like 3 states, the north, the south and the inland/farming state. Here's some information on the [URL="http://www.jeffersonstate.com/"]State of Jefferson[/URL]. That would have been cool.
Maybe Northern Maine versus the rest of the state. I know there's a secession movement there to do precisely that.
I had a friend that grew up in Northern Maine. I visited the Southern part of Maine before and I was telling him how buetiful it was and how cool it must have been for him to grow up there. He basically told me that Northern Maine and the rest of Maine were so different that I got no insite on what it was like to live in the state by just staying around the tourist towns. He said it was a completely different world.
^^^Very true. I lived 45 miles north of Bangor for a while and it was evident that the area north of Bangor and Waterville is nothing like the southern half of the state, especially the coastal areas and SW Maine.
Central and western NY are also seem to be in another state when compared to downstate up to the Albany area.
It is a big mess, in general. You have nation sized states like California or Texas, and states with barely over half million people like Wyoming. You have states like NY where the downstate part (NYC, Long Island) have NOTHING in common with upstate areas. You have states like NJ which is not really a state in itself, more like a bedroom for the adjacent metro areas. If I were the dictator of the US, I would there a ton of changes I could make (break up CA, TX, FL, NY, merge Dakotas etc).
There have been intermittent interest in making a state out of Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon, Northern Idaho, and Western Montana, or various groupings of the above sections.
I know from personal experience that Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington are very, very different from the western parts of the states, which is where the major population centers are.
^^^Very true. I lived 45 miles north of Bangor for a while and it was evident that the area north of Bangor and Waterville is nothing like the southern half of the state, especially the coastal areas and SW Maine.
Central and western NY are also seem to be in another state when compared to downstate up to the Albany area.
I work with some people that live in New York State and they actually have a whole different way bracket for calcualting taxes in Western/Upstate New York then in the New York City Area. Say you have a $250,000 house in Western New York you pay way more in taxes then if you have a $250,000 house in the New York City Area. They say its because the cost of living is so much high in NYC and its very common for people to pay over a million dollars for a home. So its not fair for the Real Estate tax brackets to be equal accross the state because a 1/2 million dollar home in NYC meens your middle class but a 1/2 million dollar home in western New York meens your rich. If you can afford the mortgage payment on the house then you should be able to afford the real estate taxes on it no matter where its located.
Last edited by ddmhughes; 10-13-2009 at 09:58 AM..
Reason: I changed tax rate to tax bracket because I was worried that "rate" was misleading.
One state would be Western NY starting west of the Hudson river and the other would be Eastern NY (Albany down to NYC and LI)
This would be beneficial to everyone
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