How do you balance low taxes, few social services, and no minimum wage?

What do you mean, how do you balance it? Go ask the people who oppose social services and minimum wages and demand low taxes. I imagine the end result is anyone who doesn't succeed financially leaches off their friends/family, goes to a church-run food bank, or starves in the street.

Wouldn't the full safety net areas be flooded with new recipients?

No: just look at who votes Republican. It's not all wealthy people.

However, it might be necessary to cut off immigration between the full safety net areas and the other areas after it becomes apparent which policies work better. The people who voted for that stuff should have to live with the policies they advocated, and shouldn't be allowed to just hop over to the other country where they had a better idea of how to run things.

That's done by both sides, plus it doesn't work with the Senate. The fact remains that there's still a pretty large number of people who elect turds like Santorum. Breaking the country apart would confine this problem to the regions where these turds are, and force the people in those regions to fix their districting problems if they don't want to be ruled by Santorumites.

I don't know if they're the majority or not, but there are a bunch of conservatives out there who are fans of Rick Santorum and would love to ban contraception.

When you see people clamoring to pass some law you can guarantee that the majority is against it. It is just a very loud minority which is trying to dictate the morality of everyone else. If they were allowed their way the majority of the state would be very unhappy about it.

Which is perfectly fine with me. If the majority allows the minority to write laws, and doesn't do enough to oppose them and elect better representatives, then they deserve to live under these laws which they don't agree with. By separating ultra-conservative states into their own country(ies; I'm guessing at least 2, southeast and midwest), the rest of us won't have to be bothered with these ultra-conservative activists any more, and the people in those countries won't have to bitch and whine about our "liberal" (read: non-religious) laws any more.

But I don't really understand why the boundaries are curved. Natural features still make more sense in my opinion, but ignoring that, why not focus more on lines of longitude and latitude? Perhaps some straight diagonals.

I think the idea is to not use natural features (e.g. river) or arbitrary straight lines, but instead to divide the country with only regard for population, metro areas, and local culture, and also to try to make the states more equal to each other (in both population and land area). One big idea with the map is to eliminate any case where a metro area (e.g. NYC, Louisville KY, Portland OR) spans a state boundary, and instead keep the metro areas well within states, and only have the borders drawn through areas as rural as possible. This keeps local culture together, and avoids things like large numbers of people commuting from one state to another (very, very common here in NJ, both near Philly and NYC), and having to deal with paying taxes to both. Rivers aren't necessarily great borders from this point-of-view, thanks to bridges and tunnels.

This map was made by a college class in the mid-70s; I imagine they got a basic map of the US and highlighted all the population centers, wrote in their populations, then debated which ones went together, and drew borders around them so that the borders were as far from the population centers as practical. Straight lines (at least like the western states have, drawn along parallels) would probably end up going through a lot of population centers. I guess you could try drawing more complex polygons, rather than curvy lines; it'd certainly be easier for the surveyors to deal with polygons than curves.

32 states sounds like a good number to me: that's 2^5. They could give up on the equalized land area idea and make Alaska a single state again.

It's just a suggestion; I'm sure another name could be found. Or maybe "Alabama" could be retained since it comprises most of the area of the new state. Other than "Tallagedo", what's your opinion? As an Alabaman, does exchanging a sliver of the east side of the state for a sliver of the east side of MS, and adding part of the FL and a tiny bit of TN make sense to you? I currently live in northern NJ and it makes total sense to me here: NYC is commutable to me, so it seems farmore sensible for my area to be part of "Hudson" than to be in a separate state, and to cross a state border every time I go over to the city that's only a bus ride away.

Yes, if lower standard of living is acceptable, it will work. Generally populations do not accept a lower standard of living than they have, but it is not impossible.

Well, you also have to remember that they probably don't see it that way. The people in those places probably think they'll have a higher standard of living and things will be better if they can do things like cut off welfare spending and not "send so much of our money to the federal government". The reality won't hit them until later. Of course, I could be wrong, and maybe my preferred regions will get the short end of the stick and Dixie will become an economic powerhouse with its conservative fiscal policies, but I kinda doubt it.

Do you think some of these "nations" will try to bring back slavery?

Honestly, no. I think that issue is dead and buried. Southern culture still has its faults to be sure, but I come from the South, and I don't see any significant number of people wanting to bring back slavery. There's still some prejudice and all, but nothing like that. Even back when slavery was legal, it wasn't all that great; it worked out ok for a few wealthy plantation owners, and the rest of the white population had a hard time finding a job. Slaves were also expensive. Today's mechanization I think renders the question moot. Machines do most of the agriculture work these days (though we do use some immigrant guest workers for crop-picking), so you don't need armies of humans just to tend crops any more. And you certainly don't want disgruntled humans operating your expensive machinery.

To that regard, fewer states within the federal system may help.

That's another thing I'd like to see: fewer states. Not just 5 or 10 though, but 38:
http://www.tjc.com/38states/
The states should all be reorganized and borders drawn based on local culture, so for instance, NYC has its own state (including northern NJ and western CT), while most of the rest of NY state is separate from it, because the two regions are nothing alike.

However, I also recognize that maintaining our current form of government and reorganizing all the states within is a far more ambitious and ridiculously unlikely plan than simply breaking the country up into 5 parts.

They don't all need their currencies propped up like the US dollar is. The western states do quite well with tech, even without needing to force other countries to respect US IP laws (no one recognizes our software patents for instance), so these states would still be quite healthy after a break-up, probably much healthier than they are now since they wouldn't need to prop up the other states. The northeast should do OK, there's still a lot of industry there and some tech. The southeast has agriculture, but they can expect a much lower standard of living, but that's OK, they'll be able to pass all the crazy religious laws they want, so I'm sure the bargain will seem worth it to them.

The constitution was supposed to be a stronger government than the articles of confederation made but it was never intended to take over most lawmaking for the states.

Doesn't matter what was intended, it was the inevitable conclusion. It's just the way strong central governments work. And it didn't all start with FDR in 1933, it was a long, slow process; much of the groundwork was laid by Lincoln and the Civil War, where states were not allowed to leave the union. That wasn't many decades after the Constitution was signed.

Don't be idiotic. The political differences between people within a single region are much smaller than the differences between far-flung regions. How many Washingtonians or Californians or Vermontians want to ban abortion and contraceptives? A very, very small minority. How many Alabamans would like to do that? Probably most of them. Same goes for marijuana: Washingtonians and Coloradans obviously are all in favor of legalizing it, Oregonians will probably vote to legalize it very soon, but it'll be a century before the southeast states agree to that. Moving these different regions into separate countries stops these issues from being contentious, and allows the different regions to move on to more important issues and make more progress, without being held back by disagreement from other regions.

See my reply to another poster. Having 50 separate countries is far too many, and suffers from huge efficiency problems as he notes. But having a weak government, as the states' rights people seem to advocate, doesn't work either: we tried this already, under the Articles of Confederation, and it didn't work. That's why we have the Constitution, with a strong central government, and necessary byproduct of a strong central government is a federal government that takes over most lawmaking from the states, leading to the situation the states' rights advocates now complain about.

You can't have it both ways: you can't have a strong central government that allows strong states' rights. It's one or the other. So I propose keeping the strong central government, but breaking up the country into ~5 new nations, each with its own strong federal government, and independent from each other. People from Alabama and Mississippi aren't going to bitch a lot about laws passed by the federal government of Dixie since there's not much disagreement between those states, but when you give a voice to totally different states like Oregon and New York, no one can agree on anything.

You don't have to break up the country, you just give more power to the state and local governments.

That doesn't work in a federal system. The central government always grabs more power. In other words, we've already tried what you suggest, and we wound up where we are now. State governments don't have any power because they don't have much funding, and have to get it from the federal government. States can't increase taxes to make up for what they get from the federal government in order to opt out of federal mandates, because their citizens would be taxed too much (having to pay 30% taxes to the IRS + another 35% to the state government isn't going to go over well). Breaking up is the only way.

Lots of small countries leads to all kinds of inefficiencies regarding trade, customs, defense, law enforcement, immigration etc etc.

That's why I never suggested "lots of small countries", only about 5. The present states would still be part of larger federal governments, just smaller ones limited to regions instead of the entire continent. There's no reason for Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine to all be separate countries, for instance. But having them in the same country as Missouri, Alabama, and Idaho just isn't working. Each new nation would have over 60 million people (assuming equal division), which is a good size for a country.

In fact what they are trying to create with enormous amount of trouble and complications, is not very much unlike what we used to have, a weak fed (because of the difficulty of getting 27 sovereign countries to agree to anything)

See, here you're agreeing with me. We tried the confederacy thing ages ago, and it didn't work out well, so we wrote the Constitution instead, and now we have a strong central government that grabs too much power. You can't have it both ways with a big country: either you have a strong central government where no one's happy and you have our current situation, or you have a weak central government where nothing gets done and you have all the "trouble and complications" you refer to.

So, my solution is a compromise: break the country up into smaller units, but not too small.

That's why you break the country up. When you have smaller regions where people are more alike, you get more agreement on issues, and the minority that disagrees is smaller. Right now, with one big giant country, you have 49% that disagrees with the majority 51% on issue X. When you break it up, region A will be 80/20 in favor of issue X, while region B will be 70/30 against that issue. Region A can have a law in favor of it, region B can have a law against it, and both sides will be much happier than the current state where there's near-deadlock.

The problem with a weak government is that it can't get that much done, and doesn't provide many necessary social services which help you to actually have a nice place to live (i.e., there's a reason that Sweden and Switzerland are much better places to live than Zimbabwe or Somalia; the former have strong social safety nets).

The problem we have is that our government is too corrupt, and there's too much diversity in the country so people can't unite and elect leaders who will get things done without being corrupt. The solution is simple: the country needs to be broken up into smaller units. What voters in Alabama want is totally different than what voters in Oregon want, and trying to balance all these differences of opinion is what's gotten us into this mess. Break the country up into 5 or so smaller nations and we won't have all this infighting, and with less power concentrated, corruption will be less of a problem. Voters in California can vote for greater social services, while voters in Mississippi can vote for contraception to be banned, and everyone can be happy.

>Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects - Conservatives know nuclear power is safe
Which would be responded to by conservatives with the old "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" argument.

I can't imagine why Fukushima would have anything to do with the argument over nuclear power is safe in the modern day. It should only be a poster child for why it's a bad idea to have an old nuclear plant located next to the ocean where it can be hit by a tsunami. That plant was just a disaster from an engineering standpoint: bad location, bad design, bad redundant systems, etc. There's plenty of reactors worldwide located in safe areas that don't have these problems. The French seem to do a pretty good job with their nuclear power industry; when was the last time they had some big disaster?