Just like California doesn't have enough water to support its population so it is a massive water grifter from the Colorado River.

Theoretically, Colorado should charge massive amounts of money for that water.

Every state helps each other out because we're united and grateful for each other!

> Only a few states produce most of the taxes that pay for the grifters like Mississippi.

That is a gross oversimplification of the US. To the point of being essentially untrue.

What makes the GP statement untrue? I can imagine that cash flows between the US and states are dissimilar from those between nations that originate from trade - is this your qualm?

These "donor" state analyses are dishonest because they use % of state budget that's from the federal government as a key metric. This metric unfairly penalizes states that run lean governments. Further, most of this federal money is entitlement spending that's following poor citizens, like the impoverished people of the Mississippi Delta, and would accrue to them no matter what state they lived in.

it's dishonest, because it doesn't take account of the massive amounts of wealth going in the opposite direction. People's daily lives have been financialised to an extent that there is always a transfer of wealth in the opposite direction

Imagine describing states at the bottom of education and public health standards with horrible racial disparities as running “lean” governments.

Are they still at the bottom of the education and health standards after adjusting for income?

Hint: I wouldn't be asking this question if I didn't know the answer.

It's long since been established that pouring money at heatlhcare and education does not do much for improving outcomes. You need to somehow cultivate a culture of less dysfunction and money can't do that by itself. It take a sociopathical kind of dishonesty to sit there and tell us with a straight face that these states would be better if they just paid more taxes and ran higher touch governments. Even in states that want to run that way the ROI of each subsequent dollar is not great and a lot of these poorer states couldn't afford to run their states that way. It would be great if states like West Virginia could run expansive public healthcare programs like states like Massachusetts do but the money just isn't there and desire to run such a program and run it well isn't there either.

In other states, those same people might not be so impoverished that they require the same amount of federal money to subsist. Perhaps running a "lean government" might have something to do with that?

According to Wikipedia[0] these states supplied >1.5% of federal tax revenues in FY2019:

California-13% New York-9% Texas-8% Florida-6% Illinois-5% Ohio-4% Pennsylvania-4% New Jersey-4% Massachusetts-3% Minnesota-3% Washington-3% Georgia-3% North Carolina-2% Virginia-2% Michigan-2% Maryland-2% Tennessee-2% Missouri-2% Indiana-2% Colorado-2% Connecticut-2%

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state

these numbers make little sense unless you normalize to per-capita. CA and NY are probably still ahead, but less so. Then factor in people living at or below property line and so on, and after a while, it won't seem so unfair to the poor Californians.

Data is a little old, but it does not appear that CA and New York are really ahead- https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2017/04/17/how...

NY and CA are pretty high on that list, but this is more current, and has them even closer to the top. Given that significant tax policy changes have occurred in the interim specifically intended to raise federal taxes on taxpayers from CA, NY, and similar states, that should be unsurprising.

https://www.moneyrates.com/research-center/federal-income-ta...

> Given that significant tax policy changes have occurred in the interim specifically intended to raise federal taxes on taxpayers from CA, NY, and similar states,

Indeed, residents of these states were underpaying federal income taxes, and the law was changed to remove the loophole.

> Indeed, residents of these states were underpaying federal income taxes

More accurately, federal tax policy was previously neutral on state tax policy, and now it has an active thumb on the scale deliberately attempting to push state tax policy toward that favored by less-successful states.

The link I posted used 2016 data, and the link you posted uses 2017 data. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act mostly impacted 2018 taxes... so I would expect 2018 data to be even more different than the two data sets we have here.

Right, but let’s take California: home of tech companies, Hollywood, big ports, etc.

People in Mississippi are purchasing their products. That money then goes to those companies, employees there, and then the government in taxes. The same goes for Florida and Colorado for vacations, for instance.

They wouldn’t have nearly the same amount of tax revenue if it wasn’t for the other states buying their stuff.

This perfectly describes the Eurozone north/south divide.

Feel free to provide a substantive description of how it really works.

https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal...

I don't know anything about US states, but we have the same arguments here in the UK.

Living outside London, there's nothing I can do in my daily life that doesn't result in a net transfer of wealth from my self, or from the public domain, into the private sector and therefore into London.

Every private or public interaction I have has been financialised. be that being forced to keep a car, having children in school, getting sick, renting or owning a house.

I could go to toilet in the middle of the park and that would result in net movement of wealth to London and offshore (someone would be sub-contracted to clean the park).

You can't eat money. Those states you call "grifters" provide the food you eat, and the resources you need.

The dollar value of those things isn't high - financial and other services are "expensive", but ultimately useless, they just move money in a circle, but don't do anything to keep people alive and well.

The states that have high GDP typically have healthy food production so I don't really understand your argument.

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/05/25/know-where-your-f...

Really? In an argument about money versus food you're giving me a map denominated in dollars?

Mississippi doesn’t produce your food unless you eat a lot of yams and catfish. They might make your car.

The “federal dependency” metric you linked is extremely misleading, so much so that I cannot seriously believe it is a honest mistake rather than a deliberate deception. Quoting my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33796536

> for example, according to their methodology, a state that collects $1k in taxes per capita, and gets $4k from federal government, while spending $5k per capita, is more dependent on federal government than a state that collects $10k in taxes, gets $10k from feds and spends $20k, which is absurd.

For example, it fully ignores the large transfer of money from the federal government to government employees in Blue eastern seaboard states. The fed is a huge employer in many blue states. See also other methodological criticisms in this thread (e.g., its criteria for dependency is just wrong -- should be absolute Fed dollars spend per capita, but is instead percentage of spend). It also ignores the benefits to higher fed tax-paying states of having the lower-paying states in the union, which are not captured solely in tax flows.

For the hi-tech and finance to function, where the riches come from, there needs to be a whole bunch basic needs met. Without energy, farming, cattling, fishing, mining, timber, transportation, etc, which are seeming cheap in value, there're no hi-tech industry or finance industry. These industries build on top of the foundations.

Mississippi is home to and end of the most important river in the U.S. if not in the world. The Mississippi River is absolutely vital to U.S. economies in the past hundred years and of now. It provides cheap and energy efficient transportation that ships goods and material around the country and to the world. Shipping is the cheapest form of transportation. The River is one of the biggest competitive advantage the U.S. has.

While agree with your point, the Mississippi river ends in Louisiana, not Mississippi.

Under the highly financialised system we have, then it's not really about what Mississippi contributes to the other states, but more about what the other states extract from Mississippi. From their natural resource and from their residents.

Well, the big difference is that the US have explicit transfer payments between states, but Europe originally did not envisage transfer payments between (sovereign) countries.

Now, of course, OCA (optimal currency area) theory predicts that we need 0. different currencies, or otherwise 1. homogeneity (ie similar response to external shocks) - not the case in Europe, or 2. perfectly free factor movement (where factors are basically capital and labour) - not the case in Europe (mostly due to language), or 3. transfer payments.

Given that 1, 2 are not the case, Europe, by entering the EUR (thus foregoing 0) has basically committed to 3 - transfer payments. So, yeah. The rich EU countries now must pay for the poorer ones - that's the long-term consequence of the currency union.

> But it's good to do it because those people in the poor states wouldn't be able to survive by themselves.

Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita than Germany or the UK. If it was in the EU it would be one of the rich countries.

This is one of the silliest HN discussions I have ever read. Ten seconds of Googling can demonstate many of these statements are untrue.

<<Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita than Germany or the UK.>>

    Mississippi 42,411 USD
    Germany     50,802 USD
    UK          47,334 USD

Wikipedia claims about $47k for Mississippi in 2022[1].

Figures for UK and Germany seem to vary quite a bit depending on who you ask. One site gives about $45k for 2021 UK[2] with lower projections for 2022 (maybe more about GBP:USD than anything else). The same site gives German GDP per capita[3] around $43k 2021.

I don't have a good explanation for the methodological differences that are producing such different results for the countries.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

[2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita

[3]: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-per-capita

Mississippi > Germany is an exaggeration, but how many people know that almost all U.S. states are wealthier than almost all European countries? Germany (the richest European country) would rank somewhere around 39th as a U.S. state (just below Tennessee and Missouri). In my experience this kind of banal statement of fact is treated with undue incredulity.

Source: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs...

Until those grifter states cough west virginia cough keep voting for bad faith actors who systematically dismantle progressive reform and critical infrastructure spending at every opportunity.