Also, when education funding happens on the county level we end up having wildly different standards of education depending on if your county is where rich people live or not - everyone wants to demand the best for their own children, but I think it's pretty settled that children, who don't have freedom of movement and aren't viewed as fully rationale agents, should have access to good education regardless of who their parents are and where they choose to live.

Differing county education funding was a real and evident problem when I was growing up in Massachuesettes in the 90s - some areas (like Wellesley) had extremely well funded schools due to local taxes while other areas had far too many students for the funds they collected. This, in part, lead to a whole big thing involving student busing[1] which was honestly pretty awful for the students that rode several hours to attend suburban schools - even if they did end up in a better funded district it was a cheap patch that avoided the real issue.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/boston...

County level would be an improvement in some places, because school districts can actually be balkanized even smaller than that.

The name of our country is the United States. The state was intended as the primary unit of general government.

Lots of land is outside of cities, and that can't be left ungoverned. And many counties have very few people, which make a lot of government functions impractical or insufficient.

So states are still a reasonable unit after 250 years.

Alternatively the name of our country (well my former country but whatever) is the United States because existing colonial governments held significant power and weren't willing to unite if it meant they could be unseated from their cushy political appointments.

I don't think going by names is the best approach when we've got legal documents and statements to go by which are far less vague.

Over 4 million Americans aren’t living in States. United States is a name, but it consists of more than just States.

Good point.

Not enough to claim that the federal government must take responsibility for all assistance programs, however.