

Where federal taxes are raised and spent - LiveTheDream
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-fiscal-union?fsrc=scn/tw/te/dc/theredandtheblack

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splat
I would guess that Delaware tops the list in paying more than is spent on it
just because so many corporations are registered there, so the corporate
income tax they pay appears to originate from Delaware. Minnesota in second
place surprised me though.

~~~
cube13
Minnesota is where a lot of credit card companies are based from. I believe
that there was a Regan-era law(may have been earlier, not sure) that allowed
multi-state credit card corporations to basically use their "home state" laws
for everyone, rather than the individual state laws. MN, at the time, had very
permissive laws for credit card regulation, so a lot of companies relocated to
the Twin Cities.

~~~
ianb
Huh, I always associated that with the Dakotas (eg:
[http://resources.lawinfo.com/en/Articles/Credit-Card-Gift-
Ca...](http://resources.lawinfo.com/en/Articles/Credit-Card-Gift-Card-and-E-
payments/Federal/south-dakota-a-favorite-state-for-credit-card.html)). I can't
find anything referring to that happening with Minnesota, and I haven't
noticed a particularly large amount of that sort of activity here.

~~~
cube13
Oh, that's right. It was the Dakotas. Whoops!

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hugh3
It's hard to draw any conclusions from this, apart from everyone's favourite
conclusion "This graph totally supports my existing political opinions".

One thing seriously missing: the District of Columbia.

~~~
ender7
I'm curious how conservatives will find that this supports their existing
political opinions. "Red states deserve more of those tax dollars that are
evil and shouldn't have been paid?"

~~~
temphn
Well, if you disaggregate it, the Republican voters in blue states are
statistically net tax payers, and Democratic voters in red states who are
statistically net tax recipients.

It's a Simpson's paradox type phenomenon, where the aggregation at the state
level conceals the individual level trends. Believe the analysis is on the net
somewhere, or you can drill down to the Census micro data to confirm it
yourself.

~~~
jbooth
Citation needed?

Low-to-middle income whites are the Republican bread and butter in red states.
They split college degree whites, lose masters+ whites 3:1 or so, and lose
blacks 95:5. But their base in red states are typically not the big-ticket
taxpayers, aside from maybe in Texas. (cite, stan greenberg's book from 2004).

~~~
temphn
FWIW I didn't downmod you.

Both high and low levels of education correlate with voting Democrat. And
higher income generally correlates with voting Republican. The tricky part is
that higher education also correlates with higher income.

I believe I saw the data disaggregated in a post on Gelman's blog. Will post
in an edit if I can find it.

EDIT:

    
    
      www.historycentral.com/elections/12008/exit/Income.html [sound]
      http://mapscroll.blogspot.com/2009/03/income-and-2008-us-election.html
      http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/rich-and-poor-voters-in-2008.html
    

The second link is the same as the third link from Gelman's writeup
(syndicated by Nate Silver), except the image links in the second link aren't
broken.

The data shown indicates that Republicans tend to be on average wealthier than
Democrats, until you get to the ultra high income levels. If you think about
it, this does start to suggest that there are aggregation issues going on; in
general the rich pay more in taxes than the poor, and the middle class and
rich tend to vote Republican, so something counterintuitive is going on if
"red states" are net tax recipients.

I can't seem to find the original post that did the analysis, but hopefully it
seems more plausible now; if you really want to explore the issue you can get
into the PUMS sample:

<http://www.census.gov/acs/www/data_documentation/data_main>

~~~
jbooth
Hm, it's definitely not as clear as I thought, thanks for clearing that up.

I'm typically suspicious of "average" when it comes to income as Bill Gates
into a bar makes the patrons much richer on average. But at a glance those
seem to be pretty good faith. Dunno why I was so certain, I'll have to dig up
that Greenberg book again.

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Aloisius
Some of these states (Florida, New Mexico & Arizona I believe) have an odd
distribution of money partially due to large retirement communities.

