Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
State Ranking of Per Capita Spending, Per-Capita Tax Return on the Federal Tax Dollar: Fiscal 2002
1 New Mexico 2.34
2 North Dakota 2.04
3 Alaska 1.91
4 Mississippi 1.88
5 West Virginia 1.81
6 Montana 1.65
7 Alabama 1.64
8 South Dakota 1.58
9 Hawaii 1.56
10 Arkansas 1.55
11 Oklahoma 1.52
12 Virginia 1.51
13 Kentucky 1.50
14 Louisiana 1.49
15 South Carolina 1.34
16 Maine 1.34
17 Missouri 1.33
18 Idaho 1.31
19 Maryland 1.30
20 Tennessee 1.28
21 Iowa 1.22
22 Arizona 1.21
23 Nebraska 1.18
24 Utah 1.15
25 Kansas 1.13
26 Vermont 1.13
27 Pennsylvania 1.10
28 Rhode Island 1.10
29 North Carolina 1.08
30 Wyoming 1.05
31 Ohio 1.04
32 Georgia 1.04
33 Indiana 1.01
34 Florida 1.00
35 Oregon 0.98
36 Texas 0.96
37 Michigan 0.90
38 Washington 0.89
39 Wisconsin 0.89
40 New York 0.87
41 Delaware 0.86
42 Colorado 0.80
43 California 0.79
44 Massachusetts 0.78
45 Illinois 0.78
46 Minnesota 0.78
47 Nevada 0.76
48 Connecticut 0.69
49 New Hampshire 0.69
50 New Jersey 0.66
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It seems to me that this kind of stuff is totally massageable, and that the "north-east/mid-west coalition for economic equality" is going to be seizing on numbers that make it look like they get screwed, and minimizing the effects of stuff that helps them/hurts non-ne/mw places.
I'm not saying it's totally off the mark, I'm just saying I bet you could come up with reasonable-sounding methodologies, using the same sources, that would produce totally different results.
