With all the bellyaching about taxes, teabaggers, and this general disdain from the radical right about the "gub-ment", I decided to take a peek at the tax spending by state. I found some interesting results. Follow below the fold for a pretty picture and a few comments.
The graph above shows Obama's election margin plotted with the net flow of federal tax dollars by state. So, if you have a tax flow of .5, that means your state gets $1.50 for every one dollar in taxes paid. On the other axis, if the Obama margin is .2, that means he won the state by 20%.
So, let's look at Alaska as a quick example way up there in the top left corner. They get $1.84 for every dollar paid in taxes for a net gain of 84 cents on the dollar. Obama lost that state by a margin of 22%.
On the other hand, lets take a look at NJ. Obama won this state by 16% yet folks in NJ get shorted by the feds by 39 cents for every dollar in federal taxes. That is, for every dollar paid, New Jerseyans only receive 61 cents back from Uncle Sam. Seems like that ought to be a state full o'teabaggery yet they seem to be just fine with Obama.
Here's more. As you can see in the lower left quadrant of the graph, McCain only won a single state that pays more in federal taxes than it receives. More important is the trend line which isn't drawn but is pretty easy to envison. The more "blue" a state the more it subsidizes those lousy "socialist red" states. For each additional 10 cents in tax dollars that go to a state, McCain’s margin increased by about 2.3%. The correlation, for geeks out there, is -.45.
So, why are red states so socialist?
Source for tax data
Note: Tax data are from 2005.