Red States Feed At The Federal Trough, Blue States Supply The Feed

Washington Post, The States That Pay the Most in Taxes and Get the Least Benefits:

To which states does the federal government giveth, and from which does it taketh away? That is: Which states contribute the most to the federal budget in taxes, and which get the most back in terms of benefits? Or, as Joseph McClane from Rockville, Md., put it: “Which states are not pulling their weight?”

On behalf of everyone wondering about this, we called the fine folks at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a nonpartisan Albany think tank affiliated with the State University of New York. ...

Eight of the 10 states that get the most money back from the federal government per dollar they pay into the system voted for Trump in 2020. Nine of the 10 states that got the least voted for Biden. The typical red state gets back 19 cents more for each dollar sent to Washington than its blue-state friends.

To be sure, the split vanishes in the middle of the rankings, and thus the correlation between Trump vote and higher return on your tax dollars remains pretty low. It’s easily surpassed by more influential variables related to money, education and disabled population.

“It’s not political. It’s high income,” [Laura Schultz, executive director of research at the] Rockefeller Institute told us. “It should really be green states — where the money is — versus red states, where there isn’t money. It’s not blue-and-red political, it’s green-and-red financial.”

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• Red States Feed at Federal Trough, Blue States Supply the Feed (Sept. 7, 2004)