This will never change. The country is too big, it needs to be dissolved into much smaller units. If Belgium can exist as an independent state, surely NY can.
If anything it can be argued that it's Belgium that should join up with other states to command more power in the whole world. And it's already the trend given that EU is literally headquartered there.
The end result of that would be that the poorer states would descend into something resembling anarchy, absolute misery. They currently depend on the richer states to support them and the way all 50 are collectively linked together by federal programs is what makes it possible for a lot of states to exist.
Of course NY and CA and some of the other states would be just fine on their own but we'd be basically abandoning millions of people to suffer and potentially die. Not a good thing to do.
States could choose to cooperate with other states and not be subject to the same laws, I assumed this much was obvious.
If you want to see meaningful change in the world, you need to make a meaningful change. Leaving much of anything up to the federal government is just a boon to political elite.
the US is certainly stronger as a whole than as a sum of its parts, but this seems like a massive exaggeration. even the poorest US states compare favorably to other first-world nations on a per capita GDP basis. it would be a major adjustment, but states like mississippi do have the raw productivity to provide a decent life for their citizens if they could get out of their own way.
Many of the "poorer" states as some define them, actually supply a fair bit of the food for those "richer" states and beyond.
It's not a simple task to figure out which states would survive as independent countries, if for no other reason than there would be, ah, "territorial disputes."
Saying that they are poorer doesn't mean they have no value, and that's part of why it's important for all of the states to be linked together federally.
