In fact, the argument that Republicans are footing the bill for lavish spending on Democratic states might be backward. Harvard’s Jeff Frankels finds<\/a> that the relationship between federal spending and conservatism in the states actually flows in the opposite direction: conservative states get more<\/i> government largess per buck. <\/p>\n He plots the relationship between federal expenditures per dollar of taxes paid on the X-axis (2005 data) against percent of Republican votes per state on the Y-axis. In other words, as you move to the right along the X-axis, states receive more federal spending per tax dollar. As you move north on the Y-axis, states get more Republican. Here’s the graph: No. But that’s not stopping some conservatives from arguing that Obama’s stimulus is ruthlessly designed to shower money on Democrats at the expense of Republicans. Veronique de Rugy recently published a paper in which she claimed that congressional districts who elected Democrats were receiving a significantly disproportionate amount of stimulus money. Nate Silver embarrasses this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-502041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/hks.harvard.edu\/fs\/jfrankel\/blog\/images\/Repvsspending.jpg\")
Per usual, Ryan Avent at the Economist strikes<\/a> the perfect note: It’s tempting to make this a huge gotcha! and slam the Tea Partiers for cognitive dissonance, but it’s more useful to use this graph as a basic civics lesson. Big rich states tend to pay more taxes (and lean Democratic), while
\npoor, rural (Republican-leaning) states contribute less but receive disproportionate federal spending — perhaps this goes back to their two Senators giving them higher per capita representation in Washington. That’s not a political point, it’s just the way things are. Economic analysis would be more clear-eyed if researchers took off the red\/blue shades.<\/p>\n
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