Puerto Rico in, West Virginia out

The Sandbox Political Topics
1

Since West Virginia is impoverished, with its main industry, coal mining, to be phased out in the near future, I propose we resettle the entire population of WV elsewhere and turn the whole state into some kind of nature preserve, because it is quite beautiful. It should then be disbanded as a state and then reabsorbed into Virginia, re-uniting the two states since the Civil War.

To keep the # of states at 50 so we don’t have to replace millions of flags, I also propose that we turn Puerto Rico into a state.

2

If we are going to consolidate states, I’d start with Wydahotana. Then put the Dakotas together, and probably throw in Nebraska.

It has been pointed out to me, though - that consolidating states (without their consent) won’t pass muster constitutionally (Article V).

3

Combine Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Combine Delaware and Maryland
Combine New Hampshire & Vermont (and Maine too)

Let’s shrink the number of states down so they all have roughly the same population and the US Senate isn’t so skewed by fly-over country.

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4

Most of that should have been done in the late 1700s. Then maybe we could have skipped over a lot of the “big state v small state” crap.

5

That’ll just piss people off. We should instead have a single house parliamentary system. If North Dakota wants ever so slightly different local laws than South Dakota then good for them, but we shouldn’t distort Federal policy as a result.

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6

the most intelligent thing you’ve said thus far

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7

Like I said, though - that plan is disallowed by the constitution. We could split states until they are all roughly equal in population. That might skew fly-over country even more though…

8

lol. each block of NYC will be a state.

9

Yeah - we’d need about 600 states. 15 or so of them would be cut from NYC.

10

I object to this, because I’d rather one political party have all the power, even for a moment.

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11

Dictatorship has its benefits. See china’s special economic zones.

12

Not too far off. Here are some low-population states (less than 1M, est 2019):
Wyoming: 579K
Vermont: 624K
Alaska: 732K
North Dakota: 762K
South Dakota: 885K
Delaware: 974K

The population of NYC is about 8.3M, so if we wanted to normalize the population of states to approximate that of the small ones, it would be about 12 states all by itself, plus the rest of New York State (population 19.5M - 8.3M = 11.2M) would be perhaps another 16 states.

Sources:


13

I wonder how many states we’d get if we let each existing state break itself up into smaller states, under the condition that each of the resulting states has at least 1 million people. I could imagine much of NY state wanting to break away from NYC, but I don’t see NYC residents wanting to split themselves into more than one state.

Note that Californians consistently turn down plans to break their 39 million people into more than one state.

14

Finally we’d be able to kick out South Jersey