Blue state, red face: Guess who benefits more from your taxes?

Picking up on yesterday's theme, the fiscal cliff, let's look at the wider context to the argument between left and right over taxes and spending cuts.

There are serious economists who study the difference between what our states pay in taxes and how much they get in return from the U.S. government. These people generally don’t draw political, let along moral, judgments from these numbers.

I’m under no such constraint. The numbers, for decades now, have been quite clear: With some exceptions, what we regard as red states are sent a whole lot more of your hard-earned tax dollars than the traditional blue states. In effect, supposedly indolent, “tax and spend” liberals actually subsidize the individualistic, pure, and hard-working lifestyle of our conservative countrymen.

Don’t believe me? Well, there’s plenty of room for quibbling about what constitutes a tax payment vs. a federal benefit. Let’s hash that out below in the comments section. But for simplicity's sake (and to account for the fact that it’s hard to label some states as purely red or blue, I’ve taken the most recent Electoral College Map from RealClearPolitics—which shows how these states would likely vote if the presidential election were today—and cross-referenced it with numbers from one of those places peopled by serious economists: the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.*

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