We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14301241 and marked it off-topic.

Except that's not what's happening since different dynamics are in play. Florida takes in $2bn more than Texas but has 7 million fewer people.

They should have have done $/pop but this is definitely not a population heat map.

People retire to Florida. If you don't control very carefully for stuff like social security, that's a useless metric, since those people paid taxes in a different state while younger.

I think you could make the metric useful by filtering out Social Security and Medicare which come from different revenue sources then the General Fund. At that point a direct population comparison becomes much more useful

Why would you ignore 2 of the largest spending categories?

two reasons.

1. Their funding doesn't come out of discretionary spending, they self fund through individual taxes.

2. Their outlays go mainly to older people who have a tendency to group in specific states, and due to the size of the expenditure relative to the rest of the budget even a small bias in where that money goes overshadows any real variance in discretionary spending

Many of them could still be working and paying in rather than taking money out.

But they didn't pay enough taxes, social security is a huge subsidy of our wealthiest people, the elderly.