Red States, Blue States and the Distribution of Federal Spending | Jeff Frankels Weblog

A virtue of the Tea Party movement is that many of its members are engaging in national politics for the first time.  It occurred to me that they might be able to use some help figuring out the lay of the land, and so I thought I would pursue a little research on their behalf.   The question is geographical redistribution:  which states receive subsidies from the federal government, and which other states are taxed to provide those subsidies.    One might be able to sympathize with the feeling of those living in the heartland of the country that they should not have to subsidize the northeastern states through, for example, federal housing programs.

It will come as a surprise to some, but not to others, that there is a fairly strong statistical relationship, but that the direction is the opposite from what you would think if you were listening to rhetoric from Republican conservatives:   The red states (those that vote Republican) generally receive more subsidies from the federal government than they pay in taxes; in other words they are further to the right in the graph.  It is the other way around with the blue states (those that vote Democratic).