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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The country will pick up the tab for Flint, because that is how the country works. The expectation that Michigan and then the federal government will provide assistance isn't something Flint invented: it's part of the deal.

Not enough money flows to places like Flint. Michigan just barely ekes out a return on dollars remitted to the IRS; they're in the bottom quartile of benecifiaries. Meanwhile, for every $1 a Floridian pays in taxes, they receive $4.50.

The historical reason Michigan is such a low drag on the USG has a lot to do with the businesses Flint enabled.

This is such a straightforward point to make, and so easily Googlable, that I feel like you have to have known it already. Some of your acerbic comments are interesting because they bring a perspective to these discussions that I (for one) wouldn't think to consider. This was not one of those comments.

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Reread what I wrote. I didn't suggest we shouldn't help the humans in Flint. I suggested we should do so in a way that solves the problem for the humans once and for all.

The comparison to Florida is silly. Florida gets a lot of money that a) is for the national good (naval bases) and b) follows humans around (SS/medicare). The fact that humans work in NY and retire to Florida doesn't mean that we somehow owe Flint an infinite stream of subsidies.

I do oppose the variety of unfair subsidies that Florida does get, e.g. bailouts after hurricanes predictably destroy cheaply made houses.

No, once again, Florida's figure does not come from military spending.

I don't know where you are getting the data. Google suggests to me that Florida gets $2.02 per dollar invested.

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...

In any case, the specific source of federal largess to Florida is not relevant to my main point. Namely, help the humans rather than the municipality.

In much the same way, if it were a for-profit corporation that was failing horribly, I'd suggest giving the former human workers limited assistance designed to get them back into the workforce and letting the corporation die. That would be true even if other corporations get corporate welfare (which I also oppose).

Since you seem to favor the municipality over the humans, one might ask why?

To avoid status quo bias, lets ask why we shouldn't shift other programs to favor municipalities over humans, e.g. social security goes to the state where work was performed rather than the individual human who did the work?

Well, he did say "Why do we keep them alive as zombies rather than just help the humans and let the municipalities die?"

Is it reasonable to simply pick everyone up and move them? That seems at least plausible, though I'd expect the cost to still fall on the Federal government.

Yeah, we should build some naval bases in Flint, MI to even things out.

The $1/$4.50 figure isn't due to military spending, for what it's worth.

Being pretty close to $1/$1 seems about the right, though. If a city can't support itself, it can't support itself, right? Why should it be subsidized?

Same goes for Florida, for whatever it's worth.

Because that's how the state/federal financial model works. Some states are a burden (usually poor conservative states), some states pay for more themselves (New York, California, to name the biggest).

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." as it were.

> Some states are a burden (usually poor conservative states)

Yeah, I'm not sure the math is simple enough to say that definitively. People from those states are disproportionately represented in the military, for example, and there's no way to add "deaths in overseas wars" to help balance the books.

There's also a tendency to count infrastructure projects for states as being for those states. But good highways through the Midwest, for example, are also used for shipping goods coast-to-coast. The locals in Podunk, WY certainly wouldn't choose a superhighway as their first infrastructure project if they were handed 10 million dollars.

> Yeah, I'm not sure the math is simple enough to say that definitively.

Its pretty well studied:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_taxation_and_spending_...

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-f...

> People from those states are disproportionately represented in the military, for example, and there's no way to add "deaths in overseas wars" to help balance the books.

Who weren't drafted, and voluntarily went.

> There's also a tendency to count infrastructure projects for states as being for those states. But good highways through the Midwest, for example, are also used for shipping goods coast-to-coast. The locals in Podunk, WY certainly wouldn't choose a superhighway as their first infrastructure project if they were handed 10 million dollars.

Goods can be delivered to New York and California far more efficiently by water than over the continental US. Flyover country influence continues to wane as citizens continue to migrate to major urban cores.

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