https://mises.org/wire/no-red-state-economies-dont-depend-gravy-train-blue-states

No, Red State Economies Don't Depend on a "Gravy Train" from Blue States
Ryan McMaken

When Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called (again) for "national divorce" this week, a common retort among her detractors on Twitter was to claim that so-called red states are heavily dependent on so-called blue states to pay for pretty much everything. Reporter Molly Knight claimed, for example, that "Red states get their money for roads and cops and schools from blue states. You cut off that gravy train and you e [sic] got a third world country."

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Others claimed that red states would be "entirely broke" without blue states. America's social democrats have apparently fully gone over to pushing the narrative that the "red states" are poor and backward while the "blue states" are productive and economically sophisticated.

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The implication here is that red states would never survive any sort of separation from the blue states because the red states would then miss out on the presumably large amounts of free money.

Unfortunately for these critics, the data doesn't really back them up. While it is certainly true that a handful of red states receive much more in federal spending than their residents pay in federal taxes, this is not at all the situation across most red states. This is especially not the case in states with states with larger metropolitan areas such as Florida and Texas.

The real story is more complicated, and to see the details, we can look at state-by-state comparisons in terms of "return on taxes paid." This is a measure of how much each state receives in federal spending for every dollar extracted in federal taxes. States with a "return" above one dollar are getting back more than their residents paid in federal taxes. Residents in a state with a "return" below a dollar pay more than they receive.

To do this analysis, we start with the tax collections from each state, as reported by the Internal Revenue service. Then, we look at federal spending in each state. There are some smaller categories of spending that are difficult to track, but we can capture the overwhelming majority of federal spending in each state by looking at several key categories:

State revenues from federal intergovernmental t***sfers (2019).
Department of Defense spending by state (2019).
Federal share of Medicaid by state (2021).
Medicare spending by state (2019).
Social security spending (OASDI) by state1 (2021).
Once we add it all up we can see the "return on taxes paid" in graph form below:

return
By this analysis, the federal spending in Minnesota only amounted to 48 cents for every tax dollar extracted from the state. On the other hand, Mississippi received more than three dollars for every tax dollar paid by residents. Contrary to the idea that most red states are like Mississippi, however, we find that most states—both red and blue—are much closer to the middle on this. The states that are within a few cents of receiving a dollar for a dollar—i.e., "breaking even"—include the Dakotas, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Missouri, Utah, Maryland, Kansas, and Florida. Meanwhile, California and Texas are approximately equal with each other, receiving about 80 cents in federal spending for every dollar paid by residents in taxes.

My findings here are similar to the study that was repeatedly sent to Rep. Greene by many of her scoffing critics. Specifically, Green was instructed to read this Moneygeek article which purportedly "proves" that the red states depend heavily on blue-state largesse to survive. Yet, with both our analysis here, and with the Moneygeek article, we will find that the characterization of red states as an economic drain on the country requires quite a bit of hyperbole.2

After "National Divorce": A Red State vs. Blue State Breakdown

Just how badly would red states fare if they were to break off from the blue states? Well, only a minority of these states would be "in the red" and get back significantly more than they pay in. 15 out of 27 red states are either net-tax-paying states or within a few cents of "breaking even." In other words, with the exception of states like Mississippi and West Virginia and Alabama, most of these states could realistically expect to be self-funding in case of a national break-up. Moreover, viewed as a single bloc, the red states' overall "return" on taxes paid is only $1.02. Were these states to become an independent region of their own, it would hardly be impossible to manage with current tax resources. In fact, if a "Red States of America" wanted to ensure available revenues exceeded current tax liabilities, the bloc could simply exclude the less productive states. If Mississippi and West Virginia don't bring much to the table, there's no immutable law of nature requiring the "Red States of America" to include them.

Some of the current net tax receiver states could also easily change their fortunes by simply splitting off the less productive areas such as southwest Alabama, western Mississippi, and eastern Kentucky. The blue states would surely be happy enough to have those areas as dependencies

How Much GDP Do the Red States Produce?

One other tactic used to portray the red states as a bunch of impoverished welfare queens is to claim that the overwhelming majority of the US's GDP is produced in the blue states. Again, this is a sizable exaggeration. Breaking out the blue and red states as we did above, we find that the blue states naturally produce more GDP because they have more people. Specifically, the blue states contain about 54 percent of the US population and they produce about 59 percent of GDP. In contrast, the red states contain about 46 percent of the US population and produce 40 percent of GDP. In this scenario, a red state bloc would still have a GDP over $8 trillion and would have the world's third largest economy behind China and the "Blue States of America." It would have an economy larger than Germany, Japan, and India.

Looking at GDP per capita, we find the red state bloc would remain on a par with western Europe and Canada. If divided up, the blue states today would come in around $69,000 per capita. The red states would come in at about $55,000. Taken as two groups, this would place the blue states on a par with Denmark (at approximately $68,000), and the red states a little above Finland (at approximately $54,000).

Why Some States Are Net Taxpayers, and Some Aren't

Why do we have these large disparities among states? Federal tax revenues are driven heavily by the number of high-earning and full-time workers in each state. States with large numbers of retirees and elderly will thus produce less tax revenue while receiving more in federal spending. States with large low-income populations (relative to overall size) will receive a proportionally higher amount of federal spending. Thus, it's not surprising that Mississippi, with its large low-income population in the Delta region, is a net recipient of federal spending. Similarly, the population in West Virginia is relatively low-income and elderly. Neither of these states have notably large metropolitan areas to balance out these lower-income households. On the other hand, Florida, Texas, Utah, and Ohio have the productive metropolitan areas necessary to balance out populations of pensioners and the unemployed.

It should also be noted that when I say "metropolitan area" I don't mean "urban core." Activists on the Left often like to promote the idea that the most entrepreneurial, productive, and dynamic sectors of society are necessarily concentrated in urban cores. But the data does not show this. Rather "suburbanization" of both employment and labor is a longstanding trend, meaning that many sectors of the economy in recent decades have been decentralized out of the urban core, and each state's most productive centers are often found in the suburban counties—where political leanings are not at all necessarily "blue." Moreover, many of a state's most productive workers—engineers, medical personnel, entrepreneurs, financial workers, for example—choose to live in suburbs. Thus, the most productive states are often states with large sprawling suburban areas, and not necessarily "big cities" in the twentieth-century sense.

The Red States Would Survive

Rep. Greene's Twitter critics are clearly very enthusiastic about portraying Americans in red states as impoverished unsophisticated welfare queens unable to get by without wealth t***sfers from the blue states. It's a convenient narrative, although an inaccurate one. It is likely in most scenarios, however, that secession would come with short-term economic dislocations and disruptions. Yet, short-term economic troubles have never been an insurmountable obstacle to secession and revolution. The American revolutionaries, after all, voluntarily cut themselves off from trade and took on huge debts to achieve political independence. Short term economic realities also do not dictate long-term prospects. If a Red States of America embraced global trade and a reduced regulatory burden, it could expect to see its economy accelerate in the medium and longer term. Moreover, cultural issues often trump economic ones, and residents may be willing to sacrifice some amount of wealth (measurable in dollars) for the perceived advantages of political self-determination. Were red-state Americans given the option to secede in exchange for per capita GDP levels similar to those of Germany, I suspect that many would take that bargain.

1. I have taken the December 2021 spending totals and multiplied by 12 to get an approximate annual total. This gives us a plausible total of approximately $1.1 trillion across all states.
2. The chief problem with the Moneygeek analysis is that it attempts to partly define red state "dependence" on blue states in terms of federal distributions as a percentage of state revenues. This is a faulty type of analysis because this "dependence" ranking depends just as much on state tax levels as on federal spending, and the ranking thus penalizes states with low taxes. Given that state tax rates are fully within control of the state itself, a low-tax state is not actually "dependent" on federal funds since the state could raise taxes at any time without federal consent.

Biden is a sad pathetic joke. How can he represent his constituents when he cannot represent himself. Anyone who believes that Biden is capable is a fool. How can a family that claims to love a family member allow their "loved one" to embarrass themselves in front of the world. Where it a loved one of mine, I would be trying to protect them and not let them make a spectacle of themselves. I guess that's why I could never support a democrat.

This is not quite as bad as k*****g babies but is just another way they demonstrate that they only care about themselves and consolidating and maintaining power and control over everything and everyone at the cost of decency, compassion and freedom.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/president-joe-biden-labeled-a-dummy-after-not-following-walking-directions-on-red-carpet-in-poland-embarrassment-to-our-country/ar-AA17QOQm?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=eb128c45e606452589e1b12e9329e8e7

It seems that the Demorat party has declared war on just about every good thing in the US. To name just a few wars that the dems are promoting: 1. the war on the family 2. The war against White Men 3. The war against the White race 4. The war against Christianity 5. The war against economic viability 6. The war on our food supply 7. The war on human sexuality 8. The war against women in sports 9. The war against our kids 10. The war against babies in the womb 11. The Ukraine/Russian war 12. The war against our military and woke promotion 13. The war against t***h 14. The war against free speech 15. The war against guns for self defense 16. The war against our countries history. 17. The war against common sense 18. The war against monogamy 19. The war against hetetosexuality 20. The war against Trump and the Patriots 21. The war against our Constitution 22. The war against our Conservative Supreme Court justices 23. The individual war against Clarence Thomas 24. The war against Capitalism 25. The war against "due process" 26. The war to destroy our infrastructure 27. The war on climate rationality 28. The war on g****r 29. The war on cows 🐄 30. The war on our currency . 31. The war against God and His Son Jesus 31. The war against protecting our borders 32. The war on our culture 33. The war on our language 34. The war against honest e******ns 35. The war against the use of v**er i.d's. 36. The war to promote the criminals rights over the law abiding. 37. The war against Black and Hispanic Conservatives and the War against Asians having higher grades than people of color. The demorat party is always at war against goodness, morality, decency, Patriotic Americans and our way of life. Never v**e for a demorat but seek out anyone who has Conservative values to v**e for. The demorat party is a marxist, corrupted, Satanic, WARMONGERING PARTY that needs to be abolished if we are to be a free and liberty loving country.

The recent publication of Stephen Meyer's book “The Return of the God Hypothesis” motivated me to attempt a general summary of its findings and post it on OPP. This is a simple lay version of quite a lot of deeply embedded scientific studies that Meyer has drawn upon, plus his own work, to buttress his thesis that science is rapidly coming to the support of the existence of God, and the demise of scientific materialism.

Meyer supports the many conclusions of current scientific studies, beginning with three he believes well-founded, and five other avenues of research that are also found to be contributory. I list them here in no special order:

1. The Big Bang: This says that there was a beginning to our universe.

2. The Anthropic Principle: This principle demonstrates the fine-tuning of the universe where a nominal 26 cosmic constants must retain their values out to 10 or more decimal places, else there would be no universe or us. We live in a “Goldilocks Universe!”

3. The findings of the scientifically formulated intelligent design efforts of many scientists that lead to the postulation of a creative God.

4. The failure of Neo-Darwinism to account for the proliferation of body types during the Cambrian Explosion of many types, on two counts: the total lack of precursor fossils for each type, and the inability to account for where the massive information needed came from to produce the types.

5. The discovery of the highly complex machinery inside each living cell that had to be produced by way of DNA/RNA and its nucleotide chains that act as instructions for all the cell's creation and operation. Where did the intelligence come from to form the nucleotide-chain instructions?

6. Demonstration of the mathematical impossibility for undirected formation of highly specified amino acid chains of length 2,000 in sequence space within the allotted time.

7. Total inability for scientists to describe how life originated, including the failure of the primal soup/lightning theory of some years back. (The Miller Urey experiment of 1952.)

8. The discovery of the DNA/RNA mechanisms essential for production of viable cells, and the identification of many of the multiple nucleotide sequence functions. The key being the necessity for information creation and the instructions that must follow.


These findings must indeed give pause to the knowledgeable atheists among us, when so many scientific signs lead away from their beliefs, and they are left scratching for wild speculations to thwart this new view of the science.

(All errors in compiling this post are mine. Corrections are welcome!)

Reference: “Return of the God Hypothesis”
by Stephen C. Meyer, 2021

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Tommy, I did address those, but in more generic terms. I called his admin hires hacks; I did not call him out on Ukraine, because I believe we have a just war on our side there, but I did say something about too much spending...; for the spill I said internal catastrophes. Thanks for posting, I give you one out of three!
To answer the Ukraine question properly would take up about 6 pages of dense type, so I elected to ignore it for the moment, besides I was critiquing Biden and this is the one thing I can't find all that wrong so far.

A Cyclone of Destruction

Here are three dozen of the sins of our president that I have logged so far in 2023. It is undoubtedly incomplete, but I hope others will update this list, or clarify any of them that seem to be too vague. So, here is the list:

1. Signing away our sovereignty to the WHO.

2. An open borders policy letting 4 million i*****l i*******ts into the nation.

3. Failure to take real action against the rise of f******l in America that has k**led over 100,000 citizens.

4. In bed with China and taking money from them for personal use.

5. Weakening the US military by dismissing men who did refused to take the C***D shots.

6. Far too slow to act on threats in our airspace.

7. Continuing to give out substantial wages to formally C***D lock-downed citizens beyond all reason.

8. Clamping down on our f****l f**l industry to support the Green Plan, causing inflation and disruption of our supply channels.

9. Giving serious support to the idea of socialism in the US.

10. Inability to eradicate Wokism and CRT in our schools and in our society.

11. Causing serious divisions in our society, especially between progressives and
conservatives.

12. Continuing to support inflationary policies and expenditures.

13. Signing bills that benefit the Left and largely ignoring the Right.

14. Creating a shambles of our foreign policy.

15. An America Last policy.

16. Allowing A****a ad B*M to run amok in many cities.

17. Financial maneuvers that are predicted to seriously hurt the middle class.

18. Weaponizing all government agencies to support socialism efforts.

19. Failing to address the chaos in our school systems all the way from kindergarten through university.

20. Amassing millions from China and the Ukraine for his own use.

21. Suppressing the H****r B***n laptop information, that was first reported to have serious legal problems for the Biden's.

22. Allowing a two-tiered justice system to continue.

23. Seriously undermining the Constitution.

24. Not taking action to stop the “Defund the Police” movement.

25. Not taking action to stop the sanctuary city or state programs.

26. Creating chaos at every turn.

27. Inaction in the face of internal catastrophes.

28. Appointing incompetent l*****t political hacks as government administrators.

29. Officially lying to the public.

30. Promoting the C*****e C****e lie to the public, when scientists have thoroughly debunked the CO2 theory.

31. Allowing himself to be a puppet from unknown puppet-masters. A moral man would not do this.

32. Weak on the free speech issue.


33. At war on guns in the hands of citizens.

34. Allowing the National Debt to balloon to $32 trillion, and not taking effective steps to cope with it.

35. A cozy relationship with the MSM that feeds us government propaganda as t***h.

36. Obvious cyclonic cognitive dissonance.

One would think that all of these sins would add up to impeachment for total incompetence.

My cat "Roscoe" had been spayed when I adopted the animal.....but the liberals have my mind so scrambled that I don't know what pronoun to use but animal now.