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“The Evening Post, the New York Tribune, and other anti-slavery journals in this city are discharging themselves of such a mass of special and minute information about the movements of slavers, and the activity of the slave trade in New York, New London, New Bedford and Boston, that it seems highly probable they are stockholders or secret agents in the business.These ports, in which the slavers are fitted out belong to the most rabid anti-slavery States, and there can be no doubt that the vessels are the property of the Republicans in those several places. The profits of the trade are so great that they can well afford to contribute a hundred thousand dollars or more towards the election of an anti-slavery President [Lincoln]. From lists published a short time ago In the Post and Tribune, it appeared that eighty-six* slavers had Sailed from this port and the other ports we have mentioned, and from other cases since reported, the number cannot be now far short of one hundred sail. The net proceeds on a cargo of five hundred slaves are at the lowest estimate $100,000, which is only an average profit of $200 per head. The sum of the profits of the “blackbird fleet” at one hundred vessels would therefore amount to ten millions of dollars, and this estimate makes an allowance of five million for expenses and losses.From facts and figures it is evident that it is a most profitable, prosperous business, and accordingly we are informed by the Post that steamships are about to give new activity to the traffic, and that they will be packed with some 3,000 negroes, whose aggregate prices would sum up about a million of dollars. One instance is mentioned by both our anti-slavery contemporaries, of 450 negroes being landed on the 30th of June from an American bark, and sold publicly in the streets of Trinidad at an average of $650 each. The gross proceeds of this cargo would be $292,500, which, for one hundred “blackbirds.” Would amount to upwards of twenty-nine millions of dollars, leaving a clear profit of from twenty to twenty-five million. It is added, in the Post, that the Governor of Trinidad received in this transaction $30,000 hush money.Now, it may be fairly asked, how those who are not implicated or interested in the trade themselves can be so well posted in this matter of bribery, or make up the lists of slavers which have appeared in their journals? How can they be so minutely informed of the names of the vessels, their captains, the ports from which they have sailed, the number of slaves they land, the prices received for them, and the “hush money” to corrupt Governors, unless they are secret partners in the trade? If they are possessed of all this information, they must have known of the fitting out of every vessel before she sailed. Why did they not give information to the authorities before the bird had flown, unless they had an interest in concealing her flight till it was too late. Once these ships bare made their voyages and landed their cargoes, and the owners have realized fortunes, they or their agents may then inform the public that such operations were made, the legal evidence against those concerned being no longer in existence.They can thus afford to be severe in their denunciations of the slave traffic, and call it “infernal,” having the prices of the Africans in their pockets, or snugly deposited to their credit in banks, and they can also afford to bleed copiously for the purchase of campaign documents to secure the election of Old Abe Lincoln. Like sleek Joseph Surface, in the “School for Scandal,” who zealously preached up sentiments of morality to his wild brother Charles at the very moment that he had Sir Peter Teazle’s wife concealed for a criminal purpose in his room, the anti-slavery loaders are most enthusiastic against the slave traffic at the very time that they are enjoying its profits and doing a thriving business In human flesh.”The main reason that Lincoln and other Northerners wanted to “save the Union” lies in economics, not abolitionism.If the Confederacy were to survive as a separate country, there is no doubt that its import tariffs would be much lower than those of the United States. President Jefferson Davis announced in his inaugural address, “Our policy is peace, and the freest trade our necessities will permit. It is…[in] our interest, [and those of our trading partners] that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon interchange of commodities.” Later Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin offered France a special tariff exemption “for a certain defined period” in exchange for diplomatic recognition. During the entire war Confederate tariffs raised less than $4 million as compared to other war taxes of over $120 million.A low Confederate tariff presented the remaining states of the truncated Union with two consequences. First, the Federal government would lose the great majority of its tax revenue. Articles imported into the Confederacy from Europe would divert tariff revenue from the USA to the CSA. Additionally, the Confederacy’s low duties would encourage Northern-bound European imports to enter in the South where they could be smuggled across the Ohio River, or the other vast boundaries of the Northwestern states, to evade U. S. duties. Tariff compliance would become minimal thereby causing the Federal tax structure to collapse. Second, as a result of its lower tariff, residents of a Southern Confederacy would likely buy most of their manufactured goods from Europe as opposed to the Northern states where prices were inflated by protective tariffs.Thus, after the opening shots at Fort Sumter the Northern states chose to fight to “preserve the Union” because they wanted to avoid the anticipated economic consequences of disunion. “Preserving the Union” as an abstraction is simply not a satisfying explanation. In January 1861 The Philadelphia Press editorialized, “It is the enforcement of the revenue laws, not the coercion of the state that is the question of the hour. If those laws cannot be enforced, the Union is clearly gone.” Author Charles Adams reasons:If trade were to shift to the Southern ports because of a free trade zone, or extremely low duties relative to the North, then [the] great cities [of the Northeast] would go into decline and suffer economic disaster. The image painted by these editorials [from newspapers of Northeastern cities] is one of massive unemployment, the closing of factories and businesses, followed by unrest, riots, and possibly revolution. The inland cities of the North would also go into decline, like Pittsburg, where duty-free British steel and iron products would cripple the American steel industry.Ward Hill Lamon who was Lincoln’s legal partner for five years before the war and his personal bodyguard during the presidency explained why Southern secession was such a frightening threat to Northerners:[Cotton] formed the bulk of our exchanges with Europe; paid our foreign indebtedness; maintained a great marine; built towns, cities, and railways; enriched factors, brokers, and bankers; filled the federal treasury to overflowing, and made the foremost nations of the world commercially our tributaries and politically our dependents. A short crop embarrassed and distressed all Western Europe; a total failure, a war, or non-intercourse, would reduce whole communities to famine, and probably precipitate them into revolution.On the eve of the Civil War New England based cotton textile manufacturing was America’s single biggest industry. In 1860 its goods were valued at $115 million as compared about $73 million for wool and iron, which were the number two and three ranking manufacturing industries respectively.A valid study of the causes of the Civil War requires an examination of the reasons the Northern states chose to fight instead of letting the cotton states seceded peacefully. The North’s economic self-interest is too often minimized and even ignored by modern historians.Excerpt from Abbeville InstituteThe Pious Cause Narrative claims the North’s anti-slavery was motivated by a moral humanitarian concern for the black race. Hear the words of the movers and shakers in the antebellum North:“By God, sir, men born and nursed of white women are not going to be ruled by men who were brought up on the milk of some damn Negro wench!” Congressman David Wilmont of Pennsylvania. Famous for the Wilmont Proviso.“The dark man, the black man declines, it will happen by and by that the black man will only be destined for museums like the DoDo.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Northern writer, abolitionist, and humanitarian. Expressing his desire that blacks “die out.”“Southerners have retarded progress because of the direct influence of so large a population of half barbarous Africans interspersed among them, and who had instructed them in the structures and principles of African despotism.” Thomas Goodwin, Northern author and abolitionist.“I’ve heard you have abolitionists here, we have a few in Illinois and we shot one the other day.” Abraham Lincoln, 9/1848. Spoken in a jocular tone revealing his disdain for abolitionists.“Canada is just to our North, and offers a fine market for wool.” Gov of Conn. William Alfred Buckingham. His response to the need to take in black war contrabands.“There is in the great masses of the people a natural and proper loathing of the negro, which forbids contact with him as with a leper.” Chicago Times.“Confine the negro to the smallest possible area, hem him in, coup him up, sloth him off, preserve just so much of North America as it possible for the white man and to free institutions.“ The Atlantic Monthly.“I went through the State of Illinois for the purpose of getting signers to a petition, asking the Legislature to repeal the Testimony Law, so as to permit colored men to testify against white men. I went to prominent Republicans, and among others to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition to give me the right to testify in a court of justice! If we sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery!… I care nothing about that anti-slavery which wants to make the Territories free, while it is unwilling to extend to me, as a man, in the free States, all the rights of a man.” H. Ford Douglas, free negro abolitionist in Chicago, Illinois.“The white man needs this continent to labor upon. His head is clear, his arm is strong, and his necessities are fixed. He must and will have it. To secure it, he will oblige the Government of the United States to abandon intervention in favor of slave labor and slave States, and go backward forty years, and resume the original policy of intervention in favor of free labor and free States... Mr. President, this expansion of the empire of free white men is to be conducted through the process of admitting new States, and not other- wise. The white man, whether you consent or not, will make the States to be admitted, and he will make them all free States. Sec of State William Seward, Speech before the US Senate 3/3/1858.“The negro is a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation, a pitiful exotic unnecessarily and unwisely transplanted into our field, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.” William Seward, in a speech at an 1860 political rally.“In the State where I live we do not like Negroes. We do not disguise our dislike. As my friend from Indiana (Mr. Wright) said yesterday, ‘The whole people of theNorthwestern States are, for reasons, whether correct or not, opposed to having many Negroes among them, and that principle or prejudice has been engraved in the legislation of nearly all the Northwestern States.’ “ Ohio Senator John Sherman, on April 2, 1862.“Keeping slaves out of the West will confine the negro to the South.” Abolitionist Charles Elliot of Massachusetts.This is just a sampling of Northern quotes, revealing that “anti-slavery” in the North meant “anti-black.” A neutral anti-slavery Englishman you may have heard of had this to say about Northern “anti-slavery” -“I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it…that the North hates the negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the war, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale.” Charles Dickens, 1862.Primary sources reflecting Southern attitudes on race, slavery, and the war:The prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists. In the South, where slavery still exists, the negroes are less carefully kept apart; they sometimes share the labor and the recreations of the whites; the whites consent to intermix with them. The habits of the Southern people are more tolerant and compassionate.” Alexis de Tocqueville, FrenchAristocrat who toured the US in 1831.“I am struck with the close cohabitation and association of black and white. Negro women are carrying black and white babies together in their arms; black and white children are playing together. They all talked and laughed together; and the girls munched confectionary out of the same paper, with a familiarity and closeness of intimacy that would have been noticed with astonishment, if not manifest displeasure, in almost any chance company of the North.” Frederick Olmsted, Northern architect and travel writer.“Southerners have African attendants, African playmates, African recreations, African voices, African minds.” Thomas Goodwin, Northern literary author.“I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses of the North and the South. When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists, and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” Abraham Lincoln, 1858, in a rare moment of honesty pointing out that Southerners did not want slavery either and acknowledging the difficulty of ending it. Later he would reverse himself when he played the slavery card.“There are few I believe in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery is a moral and political evil. While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years be but as a single day.” Robert E. Lee, 1856.“The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution of slavery, and were quite willing to see it abolished. But, unless some humane course, based on wisdom and Christian principles, was adopted, you do them great injustice in setting them free.” Robert E. Lee, explaining that abolition must be done humanly and not unplanned (as occurred causing mass deaths among the displaced freedmen.)“It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up, we give up all. Even If this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.” Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, 1864.“War was not necessary to the abolition of slavery. Years before the agitation began at the North and the menacing acts to the institution, there was a growing feeling all over the South for its abolition. Slavery could have been blotted out without the sacrifice of brave men.” Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy.“As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps eighty percent of her armies were neither slave-holders, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed than the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its beginning to near its close, the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union.” Lt. Gen. John B. Gordon.“And to you, our colored friends we say welcome. We can never forget your faithfulness in the darkest hours of our lives. We tender to you our hearty respect and love, for you never faltered in you duty nor betrayed your trust.” Col. William Sanford at a Confederate veterans reunion 9/22/1876.“Slavery is for its end the preparation of that race for civil liberty and social enjoyment… When the time shall arrive at which emancipation is proper, those most interested will be most anxious to effect it.” Jefferson Davis, prior to secession upon the floor of the US Senate.

Individual retirement accountAn individual retirement account (IRA) is a form of "individual retirement plan", provided by many financial institutions, that provides tax advantages for retirement savings in the United States. An individual retirement account is a type of "individual retirement arrangement" as described in IRS Publication 590, individual retirement arrangements (IRAs). The term IRA, used to describe both individual retirement accounts and the broader category of individual retirement arrangements, encompasses an individual retirement account; a trust or custodial account set up for the exclusive benefit of taxpayers or their beneficiaries; and an individual retirement annuity, by which the taxpayers purchase an annuity contract or an endowment contract from a life insurance company.To answer this question, there should be more information: are you at fault? do you have insurance? how old are you? are you retired?, and would this be a withdrawal from a ROTH IRA?. So let’s start with the accident:If you cause the accidentIn most states, if you cause an accident, your insurance company pays for the damage and injury costs of victims. If you have no insurance, the victims might sue you. The process is different in the 12 “no-fault” insurance states. Drivers make claims through their own insurance for minor injuries, no matter who caused the crash. This means other people may not be able to sue you for medical costs unless the injuries are severe or the tab reaches a significant amount. Each state sets its own rules for the situations in which legal action is allowed.If someone else causes the accidentThose with no insurance may be limited in what they can sue the at-fault driver for, depending on the state.If you live in a state with “no pay, no play” laws, uninsured drivers are prevented from suing for damages that can’t be quantified with a dollar amount. These include physical pain, emotional distress, and mental suffering.Uninsured motorists in “no pay, no play” states also may have to pay a massive deductible toward repairs before they can sue for property damage costs — that is $25,000 in Louisiana, for example.States with “no pay, no play” laws are:AlaskaCaliforniaIndianaIowaKansasLouisianaMichiganMissouriNorth DakotaNew JerseyOklahomaOregonCar insurance is usually requiredAlmost every state requires drivers to prove they can take financial responsibility if they cause a crash. That often means buying car insurance, although some states allow a bond or cash deposit.Alaska and New Hampshire are special cases. Alaska doesn’t require insurance in places where registering your car is optional; people in other parts of the state do need coverage. New Hampshire doesn’t mandate auto insurance for residents with clean driving records and only requires proof of financial responsibility after a crash.» MORE: States where you might not have to get car insurancePenalties for getting caught without insuranceWhether you cause a car accident or not, if you’re caught driving without insurance or other proof of financial responsibility, you could face a wide range of consequences.For example, first-time offenders in Texas face a fine of at least $175. But in Minnesota, the same offense could carry a fine of up to $1,000, up to 90 days in jail and loss of your license and registration.Check out this list of penalties for driving without insurance compiled by the Consumer Federation of America for a state-by-state breakdown.If you have insurance, but no proofYou should keep proof of insurance, such as the policy ID card, in your vehicle. Some states allow you to show proof of insurance on your smartphone.If you cause an accident but have no proof of insurance, it’s less serious than being uninsured. You may get a citation but could potentially get it dismissed by showing proof of insurance in court.An accident with no insurance hurts future ratesWe analyzed rates for drivers in California, Illinois, and Texas who had caused an accident and were uninsured. We compared those rates with prices for drivers with clean records.Car insurance prices if you cause an accident without insuranceStateThe average rate for good driversAverage rate with one at-fault crashAverage rate with one at-fault crash and no proof of insuranceCalifornia$1,293 per year$2,016 per year$2,084 per yearIllinois$1,029 per year$1,389 per year$1,409 per yearTexas$1,429 per year$2,010 per year$2,092 per yearRates for drivers who crashed without proof of insurance were significantly higher than rates for good drivers. To a lesser degree, they were also higher than the rates for insured drivers who had caused an accident.An IRA is a type of investment vehicle that allows you to earn money tax-free until you withdraw the funds. ... If you simply deposit money into your IRA, you won't make much of anything. Once you deposit the money, go in and invest with the help of a financial professional if needed.In addition, with a Traditional IRA, you may get a tax deduction when you contribute to it, and with a Roth IRA, can withdraw money from it tax-free once you reach retirement age. Still, despite the benefits that IRAs offer, there are a number of good reasons you might be better of not putting money into your IRA. The tax advantages of an IRA can have a dramatic impact on savings over the course of several decades. While anyone can contribute up to $5,500 (or $6,500 for individuals age 50 and older) to a traditional IRA, and $6,000 in 2019, not everyone can deduct that full amount on their tax return.Can I contribute to an IRA if I am not working?Under current laws, if you're married filing jointly, you can contribute the maximum into an IRA for each spouse—even if one of you has no earned income—as long as the working spouse has income equal to both contributions. ... That's because once opened, a spousal IRA is an Individual Retirement Account like any other. Yes, you can contribute to both a Roth IRA and an employer-sponsored retirement plan such as a 401(k), SEP or SIMPLE IRA, subject to income limits. However, each type of retirement account has annual contribution limits.Can I contribute more than 5500 to my IRA?Any year in which you contribute to a Roth even though you make too much to qualify—or if you contribute more than permitted—you've made an ineligible (excess) contribution. ... The $6,000 (or $7,000) figure above is the maximum you can contribute in 2019 to either or both a Traditional and a Roth IRA.Technically, you can't borrow against your IRA or take a loan directly from it. ... Essentially, money taken out of an IRA can be put back into it or another qualified tax-advantaged account within 60 days, without taxes and penaltiesShould I withdraw from IRA to pay off debt?A: Yes, you can withdraw money from your Roth IRA to pay off debt. But it is rarely a good idea to tap money earmarked for your retirement. First, you should understand the rulesHow can I take money from my IRA without penalty?Delay IRA withdrawals until age 59 1/2. Once you turn age 59 1/2, you can withdraw any amount from your IRA without having to pay the 10 percent penalty. However, regular income tax will still be due on each withdrawalThere are so many rules when it comes to an IRA, that it seems a definitive no, at first to your question, but after much research, I seem to have found a loophole without breaking the rules. I am going to include that copy below, for those who are interested. I warn you from now that it is a lot of information, but it is good information to have at your fingertips. I have given you short simple answer’s above to basic, short, simple questions- I hope that you find it useful. Thanks for the question:How to Use Your Roth IRA as an Emergency FundBY AMY FONTINELLEUpdated Nov 5, 2018Ever feel like you don’t have enough money to save for emergencies and also save for retirement? Keeping the money in your bank account makes it easily accessible if you suddenly need a pile of cash to fix your car, cover unexpected medical bills or deal with unemployment. Putting money in a retirement account, on the other hand, comes with rules that can make it difficult to get your hands on your cash should you suddenly need it. These structures are one reason people can feel understandably reluctant to put too much in a retirement account like an IRA or 401(k), even though we know a comfortable future depends on it.Good news: An often-overlooked feature of the Roth IRA could solve your problem. Because contributions to a Roth are made with money on which you've already paid taxes, IRS rules allow you to withdraw that money at any time without penalty.By contrast, contributions to traditional IRAs are generally made with pre-tax income. You don't pay tax on that money until you withdraw it at 59½ or older, but if you do decide you need to withdraw it before that age, you pay both income tax on your withdrawal and a 10% penalty.With a Roth, only your Roth’s investment earnings must remain in the account until you’re 59½ in order to avoid paying a 10% penalty. There are limitations on how much you can earn to qualify for a Roth, but if you do qualify, your Roth can give you the safety of knowing that, if you really need it, you have penalty-free access to these savings. Your Roth account can double as a second emergency savings account.How much can you save per year? Subject to income limits, in 2019 a Roth IRA allows you to save as much as $6,000 per year (the 2018 limit is $5,500 ) and still have access to these retirement savings in the event of an emergency If you’re married, you and your spouse can each contribute $6,000, for a total of $12,000 (or $11,000 in 2018). Add an additional $1,000 per person to both 2018 and 2019 contributions if either or both of you are age 50 or older.Remember the biggest benefit: Money in your Roth grows tax-free until retirement. And when you do retire, you pay no taxes on withdrawals. You also won't be mandated to take required minimum distributions (RMDs) from that account; the money can continue to grow tax-free until you need it. (With a traditional IRA, you do pay taxes on withdrawals and taking out a certain amount after age 70½ is required.)All this probably sounds way too far in the future to be important. But trust us, it is. See if you qualify and don’t miss out on making this year’s contribution – it’s an opportunity (and future tax break) you’ll never get back.Here are seven tips for using your Roth IRA as an emergency fund:1. Understand Why You’re Doing ItThe advantage of putting emergency savings into a Roth IRA is that you don't miss the limited opportunity to make that year's retirement contribution. You can only contribute a few thousand dollars to a Roth IRA each year, and once a year passes without a contribution, you lose the opportunity to make it forever.The more money set aside for retirement and the earlier saving is begun, the better. In reality, most people won't have to go back and withdraw money from their Roth, which means they'll have more saved for retirement. And in a worst-case scenario in which money does have to be withdrawn, it can be done without penalty.“Roth IRAs remain the most flexible retirement accounts in the country,” says Jeff S. Vollmer, managing director of Hyde Park Wealth Management in Cincinnati.Accessing these funds, however, should be your last resort.Matt Becker, a fee-only certified financial planner and author of Home, points out that you don’t want to be withdrawing Roth IRA contributions for minor emergencies such as car repairs or small medical bills; you should keep enough in savings for these events. Your Roth IRA emergency fund should be for larger emergencies such as unemployment or a serious illness.Withdrawing Roth contributions is a better option than racking up interest on credit card debt, but it shouldn’t be your sole source of emergency funds. Best is to have a separate emergency fund account as well as the money allocated for emergencies in your Roth.2. Only Withdraw ContributionsThe key to using a Roth IRA as an emergency fund is to avoid withdrawing investment earnings. While you can withdraw contributions at any time without penalty, withdrawal of earnings before age 59½ means you'll have to pay a 10% penalty on that money. Following this rule is simple: Don’t withdraw more than you’ve put in.If you do have to withdraw contributions, you can pay yourself back and retain your Roth contribution for that year if you act fast.“If the emergency turns out to be a short-term cash flow issue that gets resolved quickly, [you] can put the money back into the Roth IRA within 60 days to refund this account,” says certified financial planner Scott W. O'Brien, director of wealth management for WorthPointe Wealth Management in Austin, Texas. Do that and the most you'll lose is a little bit of interest.3. Don’t Invest Emergency Fund Money"It is critical not to invest the portion of your Roth dedicated to your emergency fund,” says Garrett M. Prom, founder of Prominent Financial Planning in Austin, Texas. “This money is for emergencies, which in most cases is job loss. If that job loss is part of a downturn in the economy, you will have to sell investments, usually at a loss.”The part of your Roth IRA contribution earmarked as your emergency fund doesn’t belong in stocks, bonds or mutual funds like a typical retirement contribution. It belongs in a liquid account which still earns a bit of interest, but one from which you can withdraw at a moment’s notice without losing principal. Ally Bank, for example, has an IRA savings account that pays 1.85% interest, as of September 2018.Gains to the Roth account will increase without having to pay taxes on the earnings every year, as would be the case with a regular savings account. You also won’t have to pay tax on these earnings when you withdraw them as qualified distributions once you reach retirement age.A savings account within a Roth can earn at least as much interest as a regular savings account – if not more, depending on where you bank. If you already have a Roth IRA but your brokerage doesn't have any low-risk places to keep your money while still earning interest, open a second Roth IRA at an institution that does. It’s fine to have multiple Roth IRA accounts, as long as your total contributions to all accounts don’t exceed the annual limit.Once you have a large enough emergency fund, start moving those contributions into higher-earning investments; you don't want all of your Roth contributions in cash forever. This process might take you a few months or a few years, depending on how quickly you can accumulate additional savings.4. Don't Withdraw Unseasoned Rollover FundsIf your Roth IRA contains contributions that you converted or rolled over from another retirement account, such as a 401(k) from a former employer, you’ll need to be careful about any withdrawals, because there are special rules about withdrawing rollover contributions. Unless they've been in your Roth for at least five years, you'll incur a 10% penalty if you withdraw them, and each conversion or rollover has a separate five-year waiting period.Withdrawing rollover contributions penalty-free can be tricky, so it’s a good idea to consult a tax professional if you find yourself in this situation. The good news is that if you have both regular contributions and rollover contributions, the IRS first categorizes your withdrawals as withdrawals of regular contributions before it categorizes them as withdrawals of rollover contributions.5. Know How Much Time It Takes to Get Your Contributions BackWhat good is an emergency fund if you can’t access the money when you need it? Funds availability may differ depending on the institution where you keep your Roth and the type of account you place the money in. You don’t want to learn later when you need money urgently, that it will take days to get a check or bank transfer, so find out before making a contribution to your Roth IRA how long it will take to get it back.Funds can typically be retrieved in less than three business days. If you are taking cash out of a money market or mutual fund and you put in your withdrawal request before 4 p.m. EST, you will have the money by the next business day. If the money is invested in stocks, you will need to wait three business days typically, although if you have a checking account with the same company where you have your Roth IRA, you may be able to get it faster.A wire transfer can also be a fast way to access funds, though you’ll have to pay a wire transfer fee that’s typically $25 to $30.“Most brokerage firms can wire funds directly from a Roth IRA to a checking or savings account in one business day, assuming stocks or bonds don't have to be sold to generate cash,” says Accredited Asset Management Specialist Marcus Dickerson of Beaumont, Texas.These potential delays in Roth IRA fund availability are another reason to keep some emergency cash outside of your Roth IRA, in your checking or savings account, for extremely urgent needs.6. Maximize Your ContributionOnce a particular year's deadline passes for contributing to a Roth IRA, you've lost a chance to contribute for that year forever. Since the Roth has a relatively low annual contribution limit, you don't want to miss out on making the full contribution for any year if you can help it.The maximum you can contribute for the year, as of tax year 2019, is the lesser of $6,000, or your taxable compensation for the year. If you’re 50 or older, you can contribute the lesser of $7,000 or your taxable compensation for the year. (The figures for 2018 are $5,500 and $6,500, respectively.)The IRS lowers the Roth IRA contribution limits if your filing status is married filing jointly or qualifying widow(er) and your modified AGI is $193, 000 to $203,000 in 2019 ($189,000 to $199,000 in 2018); if your modified AGI is $203,000 or more ($199,000 or more for 2018), you can’t contribute to a Roth. In 2019 single filers and heads of household hit the reduced contribution threshold at $122,000 and are disqualified once their modified AGI is $137,000 or more (or $120,000 and $135,000, respectively, in 2018).“Don't forget to fund an account for the low wage or nonworking spouse,” says Amy Rose Herrick, a Chartered Financial Consultant and paid tax preparer in Christiansted, Va. “Too many people assume you have to be earning funds to have your own retirement account. This is not true. You can have what is referred to as a spousal Roth IRA based on the earnings of the working spouse.”7. Fill Out the Correct Paperwork at Tax TimeIf you do need to withdraw contributions from your Roth IRA to use in an emergency, there’s paperwork involved. Even though you're allowed to withdraw contributions without penalty, you still have to report your withdrawals to the IRS on part III of form 8606.If you use tax preparation software, it will ask you if you made any withdrawals from a retirement account during the year and guide you through the paperwork. If you use a professional tax preparer, make sure to tell him or her about your withdrawal so he or she can fill out IRS form 8606 for you.If you only put money in your Roth and don’t take anything out, you have nothing extra to do at tax time. You don’t need to report Roth IRA contributions on your tax return since you’ve already paid tax on that income and contributions don’t reduce your taxable income.Also, if you make your Roth contribution before the income tax filing deadline for the year and need to withdraw that money before the filing deadline, the IRS treats these contributions as if you had never made them. You won’t need to report them at tax time.The Bottom Line“The Roth IRA is the perfect place to stow those ‘just in case’ funds while also taking advantage of the opportunity for tax-free growth, and tax-free income, in retirement,” Dickerson says.While the IRS calls the types of withdrawals described in this article “unqualified,” which makes it sound like you’re breaking a rule, it considers them a “return of your regular contributions” and does not tax or penalize them. “Qualified” distributions are simply those that have been in your Roth for at least five years and that you withdraw after age 59½.You have 15½ months each tax year to accumulate emergency funds to place in a Roth. For the tax year 2018, for example, you can make contributions through April 15, 2019. For the tax year 2019, you can make contributions from Jan. 1, 2019 through April 15, 2020.

support for the creation of a now must figure out how to enact it. A prior nonpartisan analysis priced it at $400 billion per year — twice the state’s current budget. There appears to be no way to finance such a plan without staggering new taxes, making California a magnet for those with chronic illnesses just as its tax rates send younger, healthier Californians house-hunting in Nevada and big tech employers consider leaving the state.But Newsom is not alone. Other governors have made similar promises, and Newsom calls together the executives of the most ideologically like-minded states — Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland. What if they banded to create a sole unified single-payer health-care system, spreading risk around a much larger pool of potential patients while creating uniformity across some of the country’s wealthiest states?Fifteen end up forming an interstate compact, a well-established mechanism for working together, explicitly introduced in the Constitution. They sketch out the contours of a common health-care market: a unified single-payer regime with start-up costs funded in part by the largest issue ever to hit the municipal-bond market. The governors agree, as well, on a uniform payroll tax and a new tax on millionaires and corporations set to the same rate with revenues earmarked for health-care costs. The Trump administration has already proved willing to grant waivers to states looking to experiment beyond the Affordable Care Act’s standards — primarily for the benefit of those seeking to offer plans on their exchanges with skimpier coverage. But the states can’t act unilaterally: The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress must approve establishment of any compact claiming authority that previously resided with the federal government.Newsom pressures his friend House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi to introduce a bill that would give the compact all federal money that flows into its constituent states for health-care costs. Pelosi’s members from Arizona and Florida balk at the proposal, which they fear would enable their states’ Republican governors to gut Obamacare protections. But there are scores more from states looking to join the compact, and their governors marshal Democratic House delegations into a bloc. The bill passes the House, with the support of tea-party Republicans eager to strike a blow against federal power.When it reaches the Senate, the initiative comes from Republicans. In 2011, then–Texas governor Rick Perry championed a Health Care Compact Alliance, joined by eight other states seeking a “regulatory shield” against the Affordable Care Act and full control over their Medicare and Medicaid funds. By the time the Democratic bill passes the House, current Texas governor Greg Abbott has rallied more than 20 states, including North Carolina, Missouri, and Arizona, for a new version of the Health Care Compact. He also has the support of two prominent senators, Ted Cruz and Majority Whip John Cornyn. Republicans who had promised for nearly a decade to repeal and replace Obamacare can finally deliver on the promise — for 40 percent of the country.The president sees opportunity, too. While running for president, Donald Trump called himself “Mr. Brexit,” a boast tied to his apocryphal claim of having accurately predicted the British vote to leave the European Union. Now he’s convinced, thanks largely to a Fox & Friends chyron reading BIGGER THAN BREXIT?, that an even more significant world-historical accomplishment is within reach. Trump lobbies Pelosi and Mitch McConnell to combine their bills. Trump beams at the Rose Garden signing ceremony, calling it “the biggest deal ever” as he goads Pelosi and McConnell into an awkward handshake. Historians will later mark it as the first step in our nation’s slow breakup, the conscious uncoupling of these United States.Let’s just admit that this arranged marriage isn’t really working anymore, is it? The partisan dynamic in Washington may have changed, but our dysfunctional, codependent relationship is still the same. The midterm results have shown that Democrats have become even more a party of cities and upscale suburbs whose votes are inefficiently packed into dense geographies, Republicans one of exurbs and rural areas overrepresented in the Senate. The new Congress will be more ideologically divided than any before it, according to a scoring system developed by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica: the Republicans more conservative, the Democrats more liberal.Come January, we are likely to find that we’ve simply shifted to another gear of a perpetual deadlock unlikely to satisfy either side. For the past eight years, there has been no movement toward goals with broad bipartisan support: to fund new infrastructure projects, or for basic gun-control measures like background checks or limits on bump stocks. Divided party control of Capitol Hill will make other advances even less likely. For the near future, the boldest policy proposals are likely to be rollbacks: Democrats angling to revert to a pre-Trump tax code, Republicans to repeal Obama’s health-care law. By December 7, Congress will have to pass spending bills to avoid a government shutdown. Next March looms another deadline to raise the debt ceiling.Meanwhile, we have discovered that too many of our good-governance guardrails, from avoidance of nepotism to transparency around candidates’ finances, have been affixed by adhesion to norms rather than force of law. The breadth and depth of the dysfunction has even Establishmentarian figures ready to concede that our current system of governance is fatally broken. Some have entertained radical process reforms that would have once been unthinkable. Prominent legal academics on both the left and the right have endorsed proposals to expand the Supreme Court or abolish lifetime tenure for its members, the latter of which has been embraced by Justice Stephen Breyer. Republican senators including Cruz and Mike Lee have pushed to end direct election of senators, which they say strengthens the federal government at the expense of states’ interests.Policy wonks across the spectrum are starting to rethink the federal compact altogether, allowing local governments to capture previously unforeseen responsibilities. Yuval Levin, a policy adviser close to both Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, wrote in 2016 that “the absence of easy answers is precisely a reason to empower a multiplicity of problem-solvers throughout our society, rather than hoping that one problem-solver in Washington gets it right.” In a recent book, The New Localism, center-left urbanists Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak exalt such local policy innovation specifically as a counterweight to the populism that now dominates national politics across the Americas and Europe.Even if they don’t use the term, states’ rights has become a cause for those on the left hoping to do more than the federal government will. Both Jacobin and The Nation have praised what the latter calls “Progressive Federalism.” San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera has called it “the New New Federalism,” a callback to Ronald Reagan’s first-term promise to reduce Washington’s influence over local government. “All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government,” Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address. At the time, Democrats interpreted New Federalism as high-minded cover for a strategy of dismantling New Deal and Great Society programs. Now they see it as their last best hope for a just society.Some states have attempted to enforce their own citizenship policies, with a dozen permitting undocumented immigrants to acquire driver’s licenses and nearly twice as many to allow them to qualify for in-state tuition. Seven states, along with a slew of municipal governments, have adopted “sanctuary” policies of official noncooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Many governors, including Republicans in Massachusetts and Maryland, have refused to deploy National Guard troops to support Trump’s border policies, and California has sued the federal government to block construction of a wall along the Mexican frontier. After the Trump administration stopped defending an Obama-era Labor Department rule to expand the share of workers entitled to overtime pay, Washington State announced it would enforce its own version of the rule and advised its peers to do the same. “It is now up to states to fortify workers through strong overtime protections,” Washington governor Jay Inslee wrote last week.In California, officials who regularly boast of overseeing the world’s fifth-largest economy have begun to talk of advancing their own foreign policy. After Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, Governor Jerry Brown — he has said “we are a separate nation in our own minds” — crossed the Pacific to negotiate a bilateral carbon-emissions pact with Chinese president Xi Jinping. “It’s true I didn’t come to Washington, I came to Beijing,” said Brown, who is often received like a head of state when he travels abroad. Around the same time, Brown promised a gathering of climate scientists that the federal government couldn’t entirely kill off their access to research data. “If Trump turns off the satellites,” he said, “California will launch its own damn satellite.”Brown’s successor Newsom comes to office just as Californians may be forced to reckon with how much farther they are willing to take this ethic of self-reliance. Since 2015, a group of California activists have been circulating petitions to give citizens a direct vote on whether they want to turn California into “a free, sovereign and independent country,” which could trigger a binding 2021 referendum on the question already being called “Calexit.”During the Obama years, it was conservatives who’d previously talked of states’ rights who began toying with the idea of starting their own countries. “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it,” Rick Perry said at a tea-party rally in 2009, before adding: “But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?” Perry’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, met with members of the Texas Nationalist Movement on the opening day of a legislative session. Right after this year’s midterms, the would-be leaders of the breakaway republics of Texas and California met at a secessionist conference in Dallas.In 2012, the White House website received secession petitions from all 50 states; Texas’s was the most popular, with more than 125,000 signatures. (A counterpetition demanded that any citizen who signed one of the secession petitions be deported.) Two years later, Reuters found that nearly one-quarter of Americans said they supported the idea of their states breaking away, a position most popular among Republicans and rural westerners.Liberal regions have tended to go bigger with their secession fantasies: Why spin off one’s own state when you could split the whole country and gain the resources and manpower of like-minded compatriots? After John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 election, a homemade digital graphic migrated across the pre-social internet. On it, the states that had cast their electoral votes for Kerry were labeled “the United States of Canada”; George W. Bush’s became “Jesusland.” After Trump’s victory, those memes graduated into op-eds, including from others who would have to acquiesce in the fantasy. “Is it time for Canada to annex Blue America?” a columnist in the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s asked last year.The fact that anyone with Photoshop can cogently cleave the country in two is a credit to the hardening of a once-fluid political map. Over half the states have cast their Electoral College votes consistently for one party in every presidential election since 2000. In 2016, those states all picked Senate winners from the same party as their presidential picks as well. But as three British geographers concluded in a 2016 article about spatial polarization, that’s not just a feature of the Electoral College map. Whether measured by county, state, or region, the partisan divide has grown since Bill Clinton’s first election: Red places have grown redder (at least in their presidential votes), blue places bluer. In 1992, 38 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties,” which went for a presidential candidate by a margin of 20 percentage points or more, the Times has reported; in 2016, the number reached 60 percent.This partisan homogeneity is shaping state governments too. Thirty-six capitals are now dominated by a single party that controls the governorship along with both houses of a legislature; for the first time in more than a century, only one state legislature in the country, Minnesota’s, will be split between two parties. If we are already living in two political geographies, why not generate a system of government to match?Or so goes the fantasy. There’s no real groundswell of support for shrinking the United States. Surveys have shown that two-thirds of Californians oppose independence, and not only because the Calexit movement’s lefty critiques of Trump do not align with its righty origins. (A co-founder of the California Independence Campaign, Louis Marinelli, is a former anti-gay-marriage activist who last year sought permanent residence in Russia.) When a candidate from the Alaskan Independence Party, which had been founded with secessionist ambitions, actually won the governorship in 1990, he turned out to be tepid on the question of sovereignty. (Sarah Palin once attended an AIP conference, and her husband, Todd, became a member.) Local movements elsewhere, whether the left-leaning Second Vermont Republic or South Carolina’s right-leaning Third Palmetto Republic, have never transcended stunt. Among institutions, only the Libertarian Party has ever endorsed the position that states should be freely able to secede.History gives us few examples of successful peaceful secessions. In the ones we do have, national identity rather than ideological differences seem to be at the root of the fissure. (The Confederate States of America would have been a notable anomaly.) When states split in the 20th century, the Australia-based scholars Peter Radan and Aleksandar Pavkovic have pointed out, there were always deep underlying fault lines of language, religion, or ethnicity. None of the three multinational states created between the two world wars — the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia — survived until the end of the 20th century.Even with widespread fatalism about the American project, there is not an obvious way to dissolve our union. Rewriting the Constitution’s balance of power would require levels of political coordination that seem far beyond the country’s existing leadership. Chances of a civil war are remote, and it is hard to visualize a series of events that could prompt a peaceable dissolution of the union. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled that states have no right to unilaterally secede. The U.N. Charter recognizes the “self-determination of peoples,” but clearly intends the latter to mean well-defined racial or ethnic groups and not, say, a collection of persons who want stronger gun-control measures. Other countries might be wary of recognizing spinoff American states for fear of the precedent. Would China vote to admit California to the United Nations if it set up Tibet or Taiwan to demand the same treatment?And yet, if the desire to secede were to grow, recent votes in Scotland and Quebec have modeled the way that secession in a developed country during years of peace can become just another political question — one debated relatively civilly, voted on democratically, without attendant allegations of treason or sedition. (Spain’s government has been less forgiving of what it calls an unconstitutional independence referendum held last year in Catalonia.)There is at least one mechanism by which a sort of soft breakup may be imaginable — and it’s already found within the Constitution. The document introduces the prospect of one state entering into a compact with another. States have created interstate compacts to maintain common standards, like the Driver’s License Compact that 47 DMVs use to exchange knowledge on traffic scofflaws. Most have been used for neighboring jurisdictions to handle common resources, like the Atlantic Salmon Compact that permits New England states to manage fish stocks in the Connecticut River Basin. (Eleven states have signed on to a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, to disregard the Electoral College, but it would require a number equal to 270 electoral votes to take effect.)Interstate compacts have rarely been applied to controversial topics. Yet to a paralyzed Congress, and a president without any deeply held views about state-federal relations, they could prove an appealing vehicle to restless factions on both the left and the right. It may be time to take the country apart and put it back together, into a shape that better aligns with the divergent, and increasingly irreconcilable, political preferences of its people — or at least to consider what such a future might look like, if for no other reason than to test our own resolve. An imagined trial separation, if you will. Or perhaps in contemplating a future apart we might stumble upon a few ideas for some new way to live together after all.So let’s return to our hypothetical spring of 2019. After Governor Newsom’s successful health-care deal, lobbyists and think tanks promote compacts for all their pet issues, and Congress — which would be unable to find bicameral majorities for any other substantive legislation — obliges. The Public Lands and Environmental Compact Act gives the states huge leeway to set environmental regulations and manage national parks on their lands, and the Labor and Workplace Compact Act permits states to draft new workplace and employment standards. There’s a Housing Compact Act, an Immigration Compact Act, and an Agriculture Compact Act, which allows the states to take all the money that would come to their citizens as farm subsidies and food stamps as block grants with the ability to set their own rules. Trump giddily signs them all.While the states could generate new partnerships for each policy area, they choose to harden their alliances. As they link their safety nets, the Newsom-led states agree to fully synchronize their tax codes so that they could end a race-to-the-bottom competition for residents and companies. Once they do, Nevada pulls out from the compact, unwilling to implement an income tax on its citizens. Washington, on the other hand, quickly amends its state constitution to permit an income tax for the first time.Seeking his own symbol of integration, Abbott unveils the new Free States Open-Carry Permit, along with new laws ensuring the right to bear arms in schools, churches, and government buildings across his alliance. Newsom and Abbott jointly lobby Congress to grant them the right to manage the Social Security funds generated by workers in their regions. Abbott wants to allow citizens to control their retirement portfolio, while Newsom wants to experiment with moving some trust-fund money from the Treasury bonds to new public-investment vehicles that will support climate-friendly technology.To kick off the Federation Era, the two governors meet on the steps of the United States Supreme Court for a photo op. Shaking hands, the men and their attorneys general pledge not to support any legal challenge to the other’s authority for two decades. All sides have an interest in permitting their new experiment to play out for a while without any unnecessary uncertainty from the courts. The states can’t stop others from suing over the constitutionality of their moves, but they want to send a message to a conservative Supreme Court that state officials are channeling the political will of 250 million Americans, all with Congress’s express consent.The most vocal opposition comes from fixtures of the Washington, D.C., Establishment and permanent bureaucracy, which fear a permanent loss of power. Both Fox News and MSNBC, on the other hand, herald the New Era of Good Feelings. For the first time ever, Gallup records three in four Americans declaring themselves satisfied with the way things are going in the United States — a supermajority that cuts across partisan and demographic divides.Over the first two decades of the Federation Era, the alliances remained relatively stable, with only occasional changes in state status. Virginia quit the Progressive Federation of America early because it felt it would lose leverage to defend the interests of the federal employees who live there. Montana nearly pulled out of the Alliance of Free States when it looked like it might be forced to abandon its closed-shop work rules to match its right-to-work sister states. Florida’s internal politics are driven by perpetual debate over whether the state stood to benefit by joining either federation; Alaska no longer has a Democratic Party and Republican Party but has entirely realigned along a Pro-Fed and Anti-Fed axis.The states that did not join a federation remained governed by Washington, where largely status-quo policies from the early-21st-century remain in place. Some are in the neutral zone, as it is known, owing to principled independent-mindedness (New Hampshire), some by ideological paralysis (Wisconsin), and some because they are happy setting their own rules (Delaware). Power, however, resides in the neutral zone. Since each of the two federations cast Electoral College votes as a bloc, by tacit understanding, any viable national candidate has to hail from the unaffiliated states. (After producing four in a row, Maine changed its official slogan to “Mother of Vice-Presidents.”) Yet with the Legislative and Executive branches largely hobbled from policy-making for much of the country, this offers minor satisfaction. It is said to be a bleak joke around the White House that the only job of the president in peacetime is to inquire daily about the health of the Supreme Court’s oldest member.By 2038, the Progressive Federation of America is being run from a former administrative building on the campus of the University of New Mexico. The federation was initially governed by commissioners appointed by governors and state legislatures. To avoid establishing a permanent bureaucracy, the governors refused to establish a dedicated base, instead rotating its chairmanship across the members for a year at a time. Lobbyists loved having the capital in San Francisco, were less enthused when New York decided it could boost the local economy by chairing its meetings in Buffalo.The abandoned campus in Albuquerque is an inadvertent monument to one of the Blue Fed’s earliest successes. The federation’s state universities initially integrated to secure basic economies of scope and scale: linking their library collections and banding together in search of greater buying power for their energy needs. After a few years, the states agreed to set in-Fed tuition for all public universities to zero. New Mexico took the boldest step. It dismantled its public-university system after determining it was more efficient to cover travel expenses for New Mexicans studying in California or Colorado than to manage its own schools, even continuing to pay lifetime salaries for its tenured professors when they were placed in jobs at new sister schools. The New Mexico regents decided to deplete the remainder of the university’s $450 million endowment to dramatically increase teacher pay for the state’s primary-school teachers. New Mexico’s public high schools are now seen as some of the country’s finest.At first, the task of the Federation commissioners was framed as simple technocracy, implementing the will of state governments. They strengthened regulations to protect workers and set a uniform $18 minimum wage across the zone, with some cost-of-living adjustments to raise the sum in New York, San Francisco, and Boston. Federation taxes have steadily risen as federal rates fell to cover its reduced obligations. Many wealthy Blue Fed residents now pay more in annual taxes to the federation than to Washington. The high-quality cradle-to-grave services those taxes fund have come to define existence across the Blue Fed, from guaranteed public preschool to lifelong medical coverage with no co-pays or deductibles, and have incubated a highly skilled workforce and some of the most impressive life-expectancy rates in the world. (Dental care continues to depend on a system of private insurance.) It was a source of pride when the Blue Fed’s generous higher-education system started drawing large numbers of middle-class families to leave southern cities for northern ones.As soon as one crosses the border into the Alliance of Free States, whether over the Wabash River from Illinois to Indiana, or the grasslands that stretch across the Iowa-Missouri border, the difference between the two federations’ sense of identity becomes immediately visible. A popular decal showing an outline of the Red Fed’s borders — with a column of prairie states rising like an extended middle finger from the clenched fist of Texas — resides on bumpers and car windows as a defiant declaration of a newly defined region’s honor.Over the first decade of its existence, Red Fed leaders found their purpose unwinding the domestic reforms of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama and with them much of the 20th-century regulatory state. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration all saw their staffs gutted, left incapable of enforcing whatever rules did remain on the books. An alphabet soup of government agencies, Bill Kristol tweeted, had become a savory bone broth.The National Labor Relations Board withered in the Red Fed, along with New Deal rules that blocked companies from interfering in employee efforts to win collective-bargaining power. The shift set off a return to the fierce business-labor battles of the Gilded Age, most visible in the emergence of new firms founded by Blackwater and Black Cube alumni, known as the Blackertons, that specialize in aggressive digital surveillance and online-misinformation campaigns against union organizers.The effective elimination of most environmental and employment regulations proved irresistible to manufacturers. Boeing announced it would stop making capital investments in its Seattle-area factory and begin to shift jet assembly to a new plant in Covington, Kentucky. Factories relocated from China to be closer to the American consumer market and avoid import tariffs. Unemployment in parts of the Red Fed fell below 2 percent and the region briefly reached 5 percent growth — each several times better than Blue Fed indicators — leading conservative economists to praise the Red Miracle.It was not just manufacturing and resource extraction that boomed in the Red Fed. As soon as the Blue Fed established its single-payer system, medical specialists began taking their practices to states where they wouldn’t be subject to the Regional Health Service’s price controls or rationing. Sloan Kettering now treats New York as little more than an administrative base; the majority of its hospital rooms are in Texas. Johns Hopkins considered closing its medical school when nearly half the faculty decamped en masse to Baylor. Wealthy Blue Fed residents willing to pay out of pocket now invariably travel to Houston when they want an immediate appointment with a specialist of their choice. The arrivals area at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport is packed with chauffeurs from van services run by clinics supported by specializing in such medical tourism.Auctions of public lands across the interior west, along with the privatization of the Tennessee Valley Authority, generated a quick gusher of cash. Vowing not to let the new government wealth create more bureaucracy, Red Fed leaders deposited it all in a Free States Energy Trust Fund that would pay out an annual dividend to every adult and child in the region — a no-strings-attached cash transfer of hundreds of dollars per year. The Southern Baptist Convention encouraged its members to tithe their dividend checks directly into new aid societies to help the least fortunate. The most popular charitable cause has been a relief society to aid religious conservatives in the Blue Fed seeking to migrate to the Red Fed.The boom in manufacturing and energy jobs on one side of the border and the guarantee of free government-sponsored education and medical care on the other created an incentive for families to split — with one spouse working (and paying taxes) in the Red Fed and the other, usually with children in tow, collecting benefits in the Blue Fed. (Remo, which pitched its app to investors as “Venmo for remittances,” became the fastest-growing tech company on the Fortune 500.) Sociologists are starting to worry that what they call the “split-family phenomenon” will become a hallmark of 21st-century life in North America, with its effects growing more pronounced as federation policies continue to diverge.Reaction to Blue Fed culture drives much Red Fed governance. When the Blue Fed opened a gleaming new visitor center at Yosemite, the Red Fed moved to privatize all the concessions at Yellowstone. The Blue Fed’s expansive affirmative-action protocols inspired the Red Fed to abolish all HBCU-specific education programs so that primarily white institutions could compete equally for the funds. After Illinois led a Blue Fed initiative to upgrade its rail service, the Red Fed ended all cooperation with Amtrak, even adjusting gauge size along the Mississippi River to prevent passage of passenger trains from one side to another. As a backlash to the Blue Fed’s net-neutrality rule, the Red Fed imposed the Online Fairness Doctrine, which permits internet providers to slow upload and download speeds for content they determined was in violation of “community standards” or that offends a company’s religious beliefs. Across large swaths of the Red Fed, the only way to log into Grindr is via VPN.These culture-war skirmishes instilled a strong sense of Red Fed identity, and the economy was doing so well that few noticed the slow exodus of tech entrepreneurs and high-skilled creative professionals who had once clustered in Austin and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Only when the Supreme Court ruled that a compact-wide abortion ban did not place an undue burden on reproductive freedom because Red Fed residents could travel for free services in the Blue Fed did it become evident that conservative social policy would impede efforts to diversify the Red Fed economy beyond natural resources and heavy manufacturing. Amazon’s list of candidate cities to house its HQ14 did not include a single one in the Red Fed.Each federation is the other’s largest trading partner, but they increasingly assume the posture of rivals. When the Blue Fed imposed a controversial excise tax on all products or services generated by companies that could not prove they paid their employees at least $18 per hour, the Red Fed saw it as a de facto tariff on its goods. It retaliated by placing its own excise tax on domestic wine, which led the Red Fed to deepen its trade ties with Chile and Argentina. That was a short-term diversion, but prompted a deeper examination of how economically dependent one federation had grown on the other’s internal policies. A Blue Fed requirement that certain freight classes travel only by all-electric truck fleets had nearly doubled the cost of transporting products to the interior west. Frequent work stoppages by West Coast longshoremen emboldened by their labor-friendly administration affirmed a strategy agreed to by titans of Red Fed industry: They needed their own Pacific port.Red Fed leaders negotiated a deal with Mexican authorities for operating control of the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, in Michoacán state, investing some of its energy trust funds. A new terminal, staffed by American Customs officials, connects directly with a spur of the Kansas City Southern railroad. There, nonunion laborers load ships with minerals mined through the American West, including lithium and soda ash, heading largely to East Asia, and unload bananas and smartphones from Ecuador and China heading for the landlocked states of the Red Fed without ever once passing through Blue Fed territory.And then came the first humanitarian crisis. When the families of West Virginia workers started overloading schools and hospitals across the border in Hagerstown, Maryland, the Blue Fed began to impose residence requirements for many of its social services. That didn’t stop the migrants, but it led them to cluster in border towns as they waited out the six months required for eligibility. The conditions were often dire. Tent cities around Palm Springs saw the first American measles outbreak in a generation, and in the Spokane bidonvilles, dozens of children froze to death during a harsh winter.Those tragedies set off a reckoning that has prompted an identity crisis for the Blue Fed’s leaders and citizens. On one side, fiscal experts say the Nordic-style welfare state that the Blue Fed has established is unsustainable if it just ends up as an unchecked provider of services to some of the Red Fed’s neediest cases. On the other side, some of the progressive activists who played crucial roles building early support for the health-care compact argue that the Blue Fed has an obligation to promote its values even beyond its borders. The debate rages across the region: What obligation do they have to other Americans who have democratically chosen to pursue a very different way of life?The federations had a gentlemen’s agreement not to drag federal authorities into their disagreements, but the nature of their conflicts made that impossible. Once the Blue Fed declared itself a “sanctuary region” and invited undocumented immigrants elsewhere in the United States to seek refuge, Red Fed leaders threatened to erect internal border controls on state lines. The Blue Fed backed down, publicly revoking its invitation, but only after the Red Fed agreed to jointly lobby Congress to create a series of regionally restricted work visas.The federal government remains the enforcer of the country’s citizenship laws, agent of its foreign affairs, controller of its national defense, and manager of its monetary policy. But it grew increasingly impossible to perform any of those roles neutrally, and many of the country’s democratic institutions were not designed to balance the competing interests of two geopolitical rivals.When the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to stop the Red Fed’s economy from overheating, it pushed the rest of the country into recession, prompting the Great Lakes to lead the first successful campaign to have the Federal Reserve Board removed from office. When Hurricane Rigoberto came through the Gulf of Mexico, leaving large portions of Houston underwater for months — the first trillion-dollar natural disaster, at least when the cost of the subsequent malaria outbreak is included — the Red Fed demanded a bailout from the federal government. Blue Fed politicians said it would be “moral hazard” to do so, given that most of the damage was traced to a Red Fed decision to privatize the Houston Ship Channel and entrust the buyer, a Qatari sovereign-wealth fund, with upkeep of the Galveston Seawall and the levee networks of surrounding southeastern Texas counties.The Pentagon lost its authority to act as a nonaligned arbiter of the national interest. Once cartels seized control of the Red Fed’s Mexican container port, taking hostage 17 retired Texas Rangers working on a private security force, the Defense secretary mobilized West Coast National Guard units to support an Army Rapid Deployment Force, along with Marines and Navy seals. Oregon’s governor balked, announcing that he would not permit his troops to “be used as muscle for the Red Fed’s imperial adventures.” The Supreme Court ruled that National Guard units had to follow the commander-in-chief’s orders, and the Oregon guardsmen headed south, but the incident polarized foreign-policy positions in new ways. When, months later, intelligence agencies issued a report pinning the crash of the western renewable-energy grid on a North Korean cyberattack, Red Fed cities saw some of their largest mass protests in years, all against a rush to war. Nearly 100,000 people gathered in Indianapolis’s Monument Circle, chanting “No blood for solar.” By the time of the South China Sea Crisis, Congress had grown so paralyzed along federation lines that it was impossible to assemble a majority in favor of any declaration of war.Leaders overseas have become eager to exploit what they see as the United States’s political weakness. As concerns about climate change have grown more dire, other countries have become intent on punishing dissenters from the international order, and the Red Fed is now a global villain. The European Union agreed to pre-clear for entry all crops produced under the Blue Fed’s GMO-free agriculture policy, while Red Fed imports are subjected to a lengthy and costly quarantine. China announced most-favored-region trade policies that would give Blue Fed exporters an advantage over domestic rivals when selling into the Chinese market.These trade-related conflicts squeeze Illinois, which wants to export Caterpillar tractors to China under favorable conditions but lags behind West Coast and New England states in transitioning to GMO-free agriculture. Although a founding member of the Blue Fed, Illinois at times felt geographically isolated, surrounded by Red Fed or neutral states. Illinois withdrew from the Blue Fed and helped to form the Great Lakes Federation, which stretches from Philadelphia to Des Moines and up to Duluth, with a permanent capital in Chicago. As the 20-year judicial truce is about to expire, the Midwest controls the balance of power in a Congress that may be forced by the Supreme Court to revisit some of its earliest assumptions about returning power to the states.There is another real-life contemporary example of a semi-secession: Brexit. It, too, began as little more than a thought experiment. What if we could reject a far-off governing structure that no longer seems responsive to our interests in favor of local authority that can more closely match our aspirations and sense of identity as a people? There must have been something thrilling about getting to cast a vote for self-determination.Yet those who are now forced to make that reverie real are pulling back from their former self-confidence about it. Just last week, the Tory official serving as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union admitted he “hadn’t quite understood the full extent” to which British commerce was “particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing,” and that new trade barriers could impact the availability of consumer goods in stores. Instead of just leaving Europe, as he encouraged his compatriots to do during the 2016 campaign, Dominic Raab now insists on “a bespoke arrangement on goods which recognizes the peculiar, frankly, geographic, economic entity that is the United Kingdom.”As it was for a majority of Britons, it is easier to imagine breaking up the United States than figuring out how to make it work — whether through bold new policies or merely a functioning version of consensus politics. The seeming inelasticity of our system of governance also guarantees a security and predictability that we take for granted. Some of the lessons Europe is being taught under the stress of the Brexit crisis — that a single currency requires a unified economy, or that a lack of internal borders can’t work if no one can agree on what should happen at the outer one — are ones Americans might better learn from fantasy than from experience.