Best Places to Raise a Family in South Carolina
Which States Are Givers and Which Are Takers?
And is that even the right style to frame the question?
Updated on March viii, 2017.
Maps showing regional differences among Americans are all the rage these days, such as this depiction of the contours of baseball fandom, or this one of the beers we're declared to favor, or this showing the places in America where none of us lives, or this artistic video/map showing where Americans apply different words for common things such as soda.
For my money, one of the more interesting maps appearing recently came from the personal-finance website WalletHub. Analysts there set out to make up one's mind how states compare in terms of their reliance on federal funding.
The WalletHub analysts essentially asked how much each state receives back as a return on its federal income-tax investment. They compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia on 3 metrics: (one) federal spending per capita compared with every dollar paid in federal income taxes; (2) the percentage of a state'south annual revenue that comes from federal funding; and (3) the number of federal employees per capita. The third measure received only half the weight of each of the others in the calculation.
What the resulting map shows is that the most "dependent states," as measured by the blended score, are Mississippi and New Mexico, each of which gets back almost $3 in federal spending for every dollar they ship to the federal treasury in taxes. Alabama and Louisiana are shut behind.
If you look only at the first measure—how much the federal government spends per person in each state compared with the amount its citizens pay in federal income taxes—other states stand out, particularly S Carolina: The Palmetto Land receives $7.87 back from Washington for every $1 its citizens pay in federal tax. This bar chart, made from WalletHub's information, reveals the sharp discrepancies amongst states on that measure.
On the other side of this group, folks in 14 states, including Delaware, Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska, and Ohio, get dorsum less than $1 for each $1 they spend in taxes.
Information technology's not merely that some states are getting way more than in render for their federal tax dollars, simply the disproportionate amount of federal aid that some states receive allows them to proceed their ain taxes artificially low. That's the statement WalletHub analysts brand in their 2014 report on all-time and worst states to be a taxpayer.
Part of the explanation for why southern states dominate the "most dependent" category is historical. During the many decades in the 20th century when the South was solidly Democratic, its congressional representatives in both the Firm and the Senate, enjoying bang-up seniority, came to hold leadership positions on powerful committees, which they used to send federal dollars back to their habitation states in the course of contracts, projects, and installations.
Some other part of the explanation is easier to discern. The reddest states on that map at the top—Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, New Mexico, Maine—have exceptionally high poverty rates and thus receive disproportionately big shares of federal dollars. Through a variety of social programs, the federal government disburses hundreds of billions of dollars each twelvemonth to maintain a "safety net" intended to help the neediest among us. Consider, for instance, the percent of each country's residents who go food stamps through the federal government'due south SNAP programme. This nautical chart tells the story.
Another manner of getting at the aforementioned point is to map the pct of families in 2012 with incomes below the federal poverty level (co-ordinate to the Demography Agency'due south ACS five-twelvemonth estimate). This map, fabricated through Social Explorer, shows the data at the county level: The darker the shading, the higher the percentage of impoverished residents.
You tin become hither to see an interactive version of this map that enables you to coil your cursor over counties and get pop-up information showing the percentages for any specific canton. You can also change the map view, showing the information at dissimilar levels, ranging from states all the way down to individual census block groups. (To run into the mapped information at sub-canton levels, you lot have to zoom way in to particular areas.)
There are various means of thinking about what WalletHub's "state dependency" map tells u.s.. One approach is to shine light on the red-states-as-takers paradox: Dominated by Republican voters who profess their distaste for the federal government and its social programs, these are the very states that rank highest on the dependency index. That, for instance, is how Business Insider handled the story:
Who really benefits from regime spending? If you lot listen to Rush Limbaugh, you might retrieve it was those blueish states, packed with damn hippie socialist liberals, sipping their lattes and providing complimentary abortions for bored, horny teenagers. ...
Every bit it turns out, it is cerise states that are overwhelmingly the Welfare Queen States. Aye, that'southward right. Cherry-red States—the ones governed past folks who retrieve authorities is too big and spending needs to exist cutting—are a net bleed on the economy, taking in more than federal spending than they pay out in federal taxes. They talk a skillful game, but stick Blueish States with the neb.
Off-white enough. That's a tricky perspective. And there are few things more fun than exposing hypocrisy.
Alternatively, we could use the "state dependency" map as an opportunity to reverberate on a unlike paradox—the long-standing role of the far-away federal government as an agent of customs. Because of federal programs, people in places like South Carolina and Mississippi are getting a helping manus non from their neighbors a few blocks away or in the next county over, but from residents of Delaware, Minnesota, Illinois, and Nebraska. Whether you like that idea depends, in part, on how you personally reconcile the tension between ii long-cherished, cadre American values—our passion for individualism and our regard for community—and whether y'all meet "community" as encompassing the whole state.
That's a far more interesting thing to think well-nigh (though perhaps less viscerally satisfying) than which states are moochers or freeloaders and which are getting fleeced.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/
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