will be lost. Second, that you seem to assume there will only be one person paying for these services. The infrastructure is already there, the overhead cost is trained personnel and maintenance. The personnel are also already there. You'd need to show that that 8-10% of annual income will be necessarily inadequate when spent on the upkeep of existing utilities and labor instead of going to taxes. I'd need to see numbers to the effect that the existing infrastructure costs each person &gt;8-0% of their income, along with the potential difference in cost if the utilities were managed privately. My leap was only that rural areas did not have any of these thing until federal aid. It seem like it's quite a leap to believe it will continue after that aid is gone. And rural Mississippi median income is apparently closer to $18,000 which actually puts their effective tax around 0%. But why would they vote for that? Their state would collapse. It would be catastrophic for them. And ironically, the wealthier liberal states would actually have more money, because they would not longer be supporting those poorer conservative states. To be clear, I'm not debating which is right or wrong. I just can't understand why a state would vote for it's own demise. I really must be missing something here. I just don't get it. To argue this in your own terms (taking this quite purely at face value, just for conversational purposes) to make it easier to understand: