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Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

upi.com

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Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#91

Post by UncleOxidant »

cronix wrote: post #56
throwkeep wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing they like some combination of geography, neighborhood, house, job where they live?

Most are farmers who have been working the same land for generations. They know it inside and out under all sorts of conditions. It's kind of trivial to move a household vs an entire farm system. It can take several years to get it all up and running again, depending on your crop/animals of course. There is no political back and forth like there used to be where you'd have republicans controlling things for a time an…

> Most are farmers

A few are farmers. Looking back a generation or two most of the people in southern Oregon were employed by the timber industry - that number has shrunk considerably over the last generation. There are Eastern Oregon ranches but they tend to be pretty large so not a whole lot of actual farmers/ranchers in total. Yes, they employ people to work on those farms/ranches. And yes, the counties involved in these votes are pretty sparsely populated, but I'd be surprised if even as many as 20% are employed in agriculture at this point. Here's some data from the ODA:

"Oregon’s principal operators of farms and ranchesmake up less than one percent of the total population of Oregon. However, when paid and unpaid on-farm workers are included the total number of workers on the farms and ranchesincreases to approximately four percent of Oregon’s population." [1]

> There is no political back and forth like there used to be where you'd have republicans controlling things for a time and then democrats.

I'm old enough to remember when Oregon Republicans were by and large quite liberal - at least the ones who actually won statewide elections (Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, Packwood - all Republicans, all would be considered quite liberal today). Both parties tended to have liberal and conservative wings back then, but the conservatives didn't win many elections.

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/ODA/shared/Documents/Publications/Adm...

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#92

Post by nkozyra »

blakesterz wrote: post #29

The URL of this story is interesting: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/05/19/Oregon-Idaho-Dona... I assume the "Oregon-Idaho-Donald-Trump-Joe-Biden" is some SEO thing? It doesn't seem all that central to the story.

It strikes me as though it's just jamming tags together to build a slug.

This was once really useful for SEO but is less so in 2021.

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#93

Post by omegaworks »

The Greater Idaho project would absorb nearly the entire water resources of the East Cascades, placing them under the control of a single state entity.

Doesn't bode well for a Western US that will be increasingly dependent on freshwater as the Earth warms.

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#94

Post by klipt »

thehappypm wrote: post #6
Tempest1981 wrote: post #2

How is the 6-Californians proposal going, I wonder? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Californias

I love how gerrymandered these proposals are. Make sure that the Bay Area is split across two states, so that both stay blue.

You know we could solve gerrymandering entirely by using proportional representation like many other democracies do.

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#95

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

jerf wrote: post #28

One of the things I periodically mentally noodle with is, what would the world look like if it was a lot easier for units to choose what larger units they would aggregate into? Like, cities choosing a county, counties choosing a state, states choosing their country, etc. I originally was noodling with this in the context of a space civilization, where there is no equivalent of "solid ground", everything's always movi…

A huge part of politics is distribution and use of resources. Resources are constrained by access, and distribution is constrained by ownership - not only of resources, but of the space between them. Where you are and what you have determines what you need and how you get it. This applies whether you're in space, on land, in the ocean, etc. Hell, it would apply if we were all just bits of data in the internet. It's all just relative access to matter in spacetime. Whenever people start moving around, or changing what other things move around (or how), conflict occurs.

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#96

Post by kingsuper20 »

mjevans wrote: post #35

Given the article's mention of Rural vs Urban I lean towards the belief that this is driven by a sense of both conservative values in government and probably a lack of understanding in how the government of the people serves the people. More precisely how taxes and math work. The GAO and similar offices should do a better job of preparing reports on where every collected tax dollar is being spent; both in the physica…

>Given the article's mention of Rural vs Urban I lean towards the belief that this is driven by a sense of both conservative values in government and probably a lack of understanding in how the government of the people serves the people. More precisely how taxes and math work.

Given the metastasizing of the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sections of the economy, and their typical concentration in urban areas, I'd say that rural areas are basically in the same position as a colony to a colonial power.

Shipping cheap raw materials to the cities, who in turn own the shares, banks, and mortgages, has always been pretty common.

Of course, if you are in favor of colonialism....

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#97

Post by kingsuper20 »

I do have to wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to just move state functions, as many as are practical, to the county level.

Counties are perfectly capable of being 100% in charge of their own schools, roads, police. They largely are, but subject to a great deal of probably unnecessary state control.

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#98

Post by yongjik »

philwelch wrote: post #57
standardUser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a proposal from greateridaho.org: https://www.greateridaho.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Grea... It includes chunks of OR and CA but not WA for some reason. It may be explained in the doc.

It’s explained in their FAQ: > Idahoans are very concerned about keeping their state as conservative as possible. They had 2.46 conservative votes per liberal vote in the 2016 presidential election, but eastern Washington only had 1.43. > Moreover, eastern Washington has a population of 1.6 million in 2017, as compared to Idaho’s population of 1.7 million. Idahoans don’t want to be outvoted by others in their own sta…

Geez, they aren't even hiding that they're gerrymandering for a jumbo Republican state (with the added "benefit" that the remaining OR and CA will become even more Democrat). Exactly what the US needs in 2021.

I'm half amused and half horrified.

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#99

Post by UncleOxidant »

GongOfFour wrote: post #88
mjevans wrote: post #35

Given the article's mention of Rural vs Urban I lean towards the belief that this is driven by a sense of both conservative values in government and probably a lack of understanding in how the government of the people serves the people. More precisely how taxes and math work. The GAO and similar offices should do a better job of preparing reports on where every collected tax dollar is being spent; both in the physica…

Here is the website for one of the groups pushing for this: https://www.greateridaho.org/ Taxes are just one part of this. They list these other issues of concern: > 1. American Values: Oregon will continue to violate more and more American values and American freedoms because normal rural Americans are outnumbered in Oregon. Not in Idaho. Addicts will be attracted to Oregon from all over the world by the 2020 drug d…

> 4. Safety: Idaho allows forests to be managed to prevent destruction of housing from huge wildfires.

If that's true then they'd be better off moving to Idaho, right? Given the vast area involved it's difficult to imagine that in a span of even a decade or more that the forests would be transformed so as to prevent wildfires. Staying where they are would only leave them in harms way for quite some years.

Re: Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

#100

Post by sofixa »

philwelch wrote: post #57
standardUser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a proposal from greateridaho.org: https://www.greateridaho.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Grea... It includes chunks of OR and CA but not WA for some reason. It may be explained in the doc.

It’s explained in their FAQ: > Idahoans are very concerned about keeping their state as conservative as possible. They had 2.46 conservative votes per liberal vote in the 2016 presidential election, but eastern Washington only had 1.43. > Moreover, eastern Washington has a population of 1.6 million in 2017, as compared to Idaho’s population of 1.7 million. Idahoans don’t want to be outvoted by others in their own sta…

Isn't it sad that they directly state they want to do this for party reasons? Like, "we only want people who vote for that party in our state". As someone from a country that isn't basically a dual one-party state, it rubs me off as very weird and very anti-freedom, liberty, logic, etc.
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