Through this act of friendly cooperation, taxpayers in towns and cities all across the nation gained. Just think what would have happened to municipal bond markets if America's biggest city had defaulted. Homeowners in every town would have been confronted with higher interest payments on city bonds. Reflect, then, that citizens of a revived New York City actually shell out 9 cents of every federal tax dollar that buys weapons and builds roads and does a hundred other things for the rest of us. My point is that this is one country.
Regional taunts are childish, regional resentments self-destructive.
What hurts the plain people in one part of America is the business of us all. Bush is right to point out that price is a function of supply. Davis is right to insist that government has a responsibility to protect people from predatory pricing, particularly on commodities so indispensable to modern life as gas and electric power. This isn't new. In the 1930s, our government launched the Rural Electrification Administration to spread the common benefits of electric power to farm homes across America.