The United States has become a country divided. Just as the below author states, we are actually two types of countries. The sad reality is that you can not convince the "red" states that their idea of government does not help their poor. And sadly, a majority of the poor live in these "red" states. Their politicians tell them that if they pay less into government that they will get more in return. The truth of the matter is that these states do not help their poor but overwhelmingly help their rich backers. They like to say if they give to the rich, then the rich will lift up the poor. This ideology sounds nice, but it isn't accurate. These poor people in the "red" states are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. Will we ever resolve this issue in our lifetime? It is doubtful, because the Republican party has convinced these red states that their idea of government works. Even though that idea of government is what put us in the mess that we are in now.

"We’ve come to think of “blue” and “red” states as political and cultural categories. The rift, though, goes much deeper than partisan differences of opinion. The borders of the United States contain two different forms of government, based on two different visions of the social contract. In blue America, state government costs more—and it spends more to ensure that everybody can pay for basic necessities such as food, housing, and health care. It invests more heavily in the long-term welfare of its population, with better-funded public schools, subsidized day care, and support for people with disabilities. In some cases, in fact, state lawmakers have decided that the social contract provided by the federal government is not generous enough. It was a blue state that first established universal health insurance and, today, it is a handful of blue states that offer paid family and medical leave.

In the red states, government is cheaper, which means the people who live there pay lower taxes. But they also get a lot less in return. The unemployment checks run out more quickly and the schools generally aren’t as good. Assistance with health care, child care, and housing is skimpier, if it exists at all. The result of this divergence is that one half of the country looks more and more like Scandinavia, while the other increasingly resembles a social Darwinist’s paradise." - Jonathan Cohn - TNR

How do we come together and fix the issues of the country? How do we become one again?