This basic fact eludes the intelligentsia who all assume that federal power is The Way Things Are (or Should Be). They assume it's the default position, when in fact the Framers intended it to be a bare-bones fallback for only basic things like the national defense.
They found a nice workaround with federal taxation though. There's a lot of instances where the states technically have the power to pass different laws than what's federally blessed. However, they'll lose federal funding if they do. And the majority of the time, that's just not a good trade-off.
So the federal government is essentially taxing the state's citizens, then giving some amount of it back to the states in exchange for rowing the boat in the right direction. States that increase their own taxes to compensate for refusal of federal funds would become noncompetitive to other states who don't.
The biggest strike against states rights in recent memory was the removal of the SALT deduction, one of the strongest protectors of state power. Now states with higher tax burdens are much less competitive, because the citizens of that state don’t benefit nearly as much for what they pay.
The SALT deduction was a massive thumb in the eye to those of us that didnt get it. Why should local tax burden have anything to do with federal taxes? It was just a handout at the end of the day.
Without it, we have a race to the bottom with social services and infrastructure. A state with better infrastructure cannot be tax-competitive with another state that simply sucks on the federal government’s teat for all its needs.
The biggest handout of all is small states getting two senators despite having 1/50th the population. SALT deductions are nothing in comparison, you could always redirect federal money to make sure red states are net beneficiaries of federal money… and whaddya know, even with the SALT deduction they were.
> another state that simply sucks on the federal government’s teat
It's antithetical to the federal nature of the US that the overwhelming majority of tax dollars are paid to the federal government and not to state and local governments. The federal government's share of taxation should be limited to support its constitutional mission, and more should remain at the state and local level to achieve state and local missions, including things like social services and infrastructure.
That way, some states may choose to have an expanded role of government with high levels of social services and infrastructure spending, some may choose the opposite, and none are left sucking on the federal teat -- the milk from which, may I remind you, are collected from people who live in every state, not just the ones with "better infrastructure".
In the end government money is just people's money taken by taxation. When you let the federal government take most of it, you allow it to browbeat the states into doing whatever the federal government wants, conveniently escaping the limitations that the Constitution placed on it.
Okay, I see you and I are coming at this from very, very different philosophical viewpoints. I do not care what the founders intended, I don’t live in 1786. I am sympathetic to Elie Mystal’s view from the book Allow Me To Retort towards the Constitution.
To summarize:
“Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all.
And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage.”
The economy turns out to be a pretty big deal, and Commerce Clause aside, states by design have little leverage over it: their borders being open, capital can always just head next door. Small federal government is basically equivalent to right-libertarian economic policy. In an alternate universe you might see liberals content to build welfare states at state level, but in this one it's not really an option.
The framers were well before the Industrial Revolution; if they intended a right-libertarian bias, the economy they wanted unchecked was a smaller and tamer beast than this one. But anyway, they did give us the Commerce Clause.
We do have to acknowledge that the Commerce Clause has been twisted to federally regulate things that are probably outside what the framers intended. In Wickard v. Filburn, the Supreme Court gave the federal government authority to fine a farmer for growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm! Neither interstate nor commerce involved. Or Gonzales v. Raich, or any number of other cases.
>The framers were well before the Industrial Revolution
They were well before radio, TV, internet, trains, automobiles, airplanes, nuclear power, and many other things that do not strictly respect state lines. "Leave most decisions to the states" made a lot of sense in 1789 but we live in a different world now.
Not compared to what democrats want the US federal government to do. EU countries have their own gun laws, separate healthcare, retirement, and unemployment systems, separate housing and labor laws, etc. Separate laws on abortion, same sex marriage, and other social issues.
This is weird, because you're crediting sovereign states for having their "own" national health care, retirement, unemployment, and housing systems, and in the wildest dreams of the Democratic party we wouldn't have a national system for all of these things.
It makes sense if you sort of skim over the idea that Germany, Sweden, and Spain are just "states" in a federation. But obviously, they are not.
@debtinflation was making a pragmatic argument: that modernity renders these granular state lines obsolete. My point is that the EU manages to keep chugging with all these little sovereign states of 5-10 million people managing their own healthcare and retirement systems
Maybe a US state is something legally different than an EU country, maybe not. I would say the two weren’t intended to be different, and whatever trends have produced such a difference were a mistake. Either way, that doesn’t address the practicality question.
Look at the specific examples I provided. European countries closely coordinate their regulation of radio spectrum, air traffic control, nuclear power, and pollution through the EC even if individual countries have separate national regulators on paper.
