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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity - Less Wrong
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Yep, you read right, and yeah, it's nuts.
Congressional elections work much differently than presidential elections. My vague impression is that nuts-and-bolts level concerns like what industries go in what state are handled by Congress, not the president.
No, actually, the federal government doesn't do all that much to determine what industries go into which states. Mostly its private decision making. Businesses are generally free to locate their operations or management wherever they want to. Of course, some businesses, like gambling, are illegal in some localities or they can get more favorable treatment in certain locations rather than others, but typically the federal government doesn't make those decisions.
Yep, I was being facetious.
While that's true in most cases, federal contracts can make a pretty big difference in some industries, particularly those connected with infrastructure or defense. (All those highway projects with signs saying "Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" form a recent and salient example.) This is a semi-adversarial process, since allocation of contracts is zero-sum and Congresscritters have incentives to funnel them to their own states or districts; "should" isn't the only concern and may not even be a primary one.
On the other hand, these incentives are tied more to regions than to parties, so choice of candidate isn't likely to make a big difference in how they're executed.