Entries for February 05, 2007

Here's a fascinating item from the Tax Foundation, which has calculated the average rate of income tax paid in each congressional district and county. Of the top 10 congressional districts, five have Democratic congressmen and five Republican. But only three–Texas 32 and 17 and New Jersey 11– voted for George W. Bush in 2004. As the Tax Foundation's Gerald Prante notes, Democrats tend to represent the highest- and lowest-income tax districts. Just a few blocks north of New York 14 (East Side of Manhattan), the highest tax district in the country, is New York 16 (South Bronx), which gets more in refundable tax credits (like the earned income tax credit) than it pays out in taxes. Similarly, the following counties actually take in more from refundable credits than they pay in income taxes: Quitman, Miss. (Delta); Maverick, Texas (border); Todd, S.D. (Sioux reservation); Noxubee, Miss. (black majority); Holmes, Miss. (Delta); Hudspeth, Texas (east of El Paso, border); Shannon, S.D. (Sioux reservation); Zavala, Texas (border); Issaquena, Miss. (Delta); and Starr, Texas (border).

I can't improve on David Frum's thoughts on J. H. Elliott's Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830. It is indeed a brilliant and thought-provoking book by a scholar of the highest quality. I would emphasize just this: Elliott makes the point several times (Pages 364, 375, 387, 398, 407, 411) that the British North American colonies were much better prepared for independence and self-government because they had representative assemblies, while the Spanish colonies did not. Had the British colonies not had representative assemblies, the history of the United States might resemble much more than it does the melancholy history of postcolonial Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, etc. Yet at one point, the existence of the representative assemblies was in doubt. King James II (1685-88) seemed to be on a course of systematically abolishing the representative assemblies. The New England colonies and New York were consolidated into a New England Confederation, with no representative assembly. James was more interested in the North American colonies than any other 17th-century English king; as Duke of York and Lord High Admiral in 1664 he had ordered the military takeover of Nieuw Amsterdam, which was renamed New York in his honor. Had he not been overthrown by the Dutch invasion led by William of Orange, stadholder of the Netherlands and from February 1689 King William III, James might have abolished the representative assemblies of the colonies further south. William's invasion and success, usually referred to as the Glorious Revolution, were extremely unlikely events, with enormous and continuing reverberations, and they are–shameless plug–the subject of my forthcoming book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers. Unfortunately, I read Elliott's book too late to cite it in my text or footnotes, though I did note that James's overthrow resulted in the reconstitution of the colonial assemblies.