The link is about state economic dependence on the federal government, not which layer of government distributes welfare benefits.

It's just a rehashing of the red state-blue state federal dependence argument, which is really the rural-urban dependence argument.

If you want to knock rural areas as being net welfare recipients, just call them rural areas rather than red states. But even that's still an unhelpful generalization.

If you really want to be granular, you would single out the urban neighborhoods, suburbs, and yes rural areas (such as oil patches) that are net contributors.

And as one of the comments pointed out, many of the rural states are completely at the mercy of the Federal government. When the Federal government controls 48% of a state's land (Wyoming), yet doesn't allow logging, mining or agricultural activities on most of it, what exactly is the local population supposed to generate revenue from?

Logging, mining, and agricultural activities is hardly an exhaustive list of economic activity. It is also strange to think about what people should do with land they don't control. Or even to assume that natural resources are the only resource of importance.

Connecticut has 3.6 million people, Wyoming has roughly 0.6 million people. 6.2% of Connecticut's 5543^2 miles of land is public 56% of Wyoming's 97818^2 miles of land is public.

So Wyoming has about 8 times as much private land as Connecticut and about 1/6th the number of people.

I realize that there is a lot more involved than just land, but it looks like in the aggregate, there is about 50 times as much private land in Wyoming per person than in Connecticut.

It is easy to poke holes in my analysis, but I'd be surprised if scarcity of land is the roadblock to a healthy economy in Wyoming.

I'm also not trying to take an opinion on whether the federal government should hold all that land, just pointing out that there is a lot of land in Wyoming on a per-capita basis.

Are the least dependent states that way because of logging, mining or agricultural activities? No. 52% of the Wyoming's land, ~50,000 sq. miles, is still more land than 18 other states have in the Union.