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.