[Guest]

OK I'm only half serious here.

But if you look at the blue and red states, they are in nice contiguous clumps. Maybe we could split the northeast and west coast off as separate nations and let the confederacy run itself into the ground without us? We could adopt the euro, heading off the dollar crisis.. maybe join the EU. And we could actually have a sane government.

I would expect a massive brain drain in the red states as most of the intelligent (esp. scientific) people left for the blue states. Our own bible cultists would hopefully run to the sweet land of racism and theocracy down south.

What would the economic ramifications be of this? Would the NEast be too screwed in terms of natgas supplies? Grain?

[Clouseau2]

There was a lot of talk about this. I agree, I could finally have a government that has my values ...

Here is what the map would look like:

http://house.style.net/usa.jpg

We in the United States of Canada would get the tar sands, Hollywood, Microsoft, Wall street & Broadway. Jesusland would get to keep Wal-mart, NASCAR, wheat, corn & oil fields.

They could have a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, abolish the minimum wage, teach creatonism and elect Jerry Falwell as President. They could invade every muslim country on the planet.

We could have universal healthcare, a more progressive tax system, high fuel taxes encouraging alternative fuel development and equal rights for gays & lesbians.

I'd probably want the red states to give up their nu-ku-lar weapons first though, the though of Falwell with his finger on the button is kind of scary.

[bart]

A conversation about this very topic is now underway in the "Partition America" forum at http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic2677-0-asc-0.html .

[pip]

The South will rise again.