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Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

What does that heat map achieve? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to show the raw billions per state. Instead it'd be interesting to see the $/population in those states. Because otherwise you'll obviously see a lot of money going to highly populated states like CA and TX.

For instance it would show that CA and TX receive about the same amount of money, but Alabama receives 85% more money than California per inhabitant

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It does have a documented API. Maybe someone can hackup the data with more informative visualizations. hmm

https://api.usaspending.gov/

It makes it look like CA receives more than its fair share of federal money, which then is used as justification for moving that to other states.

$/population is more useful, but even more useful would be "revenue - spending" or "(revenue - spending) / population". I suspect that California would be positive, while smaller rural states would be negative.

Federal programs are supposed to benefit multiple states, so it's sad that there are so many programs that benefit specific states: Something like the interstate highway is useful to California citizens/businesses even though most of the highway isn't maintained by California and the money isn't given to California. So an argument that California pays "more than its fair share" for the highway isn't convincing.

Contrast the highway with Medicare, where the benefits accrue to each state individually. An argument that California pays "more than its fair share" for Medicare would be more convincing to me.

was going to say the same, seems like its a poor attempt to show how we are wasting taxpayers money on a few states hence .. we should shut down these 'wasteful' govt programs.

honestly how hard would it have been (even for beta) to show the revenue breakdown by the states also?

No. It'd show that rich states like TX, NY, CA carry the rest of the nation. And they hate us for it.

Edit, because some google-impaired pedant will insist on a cite for common knowledge: https://taxfoundation.org/federal-taxes-paid-vs-federal-spen...

Edit: pendant -> pedant

> And they hate us for it.

I don't know where you live. Who's "us"?

From the tone and the average HN demographic, I'd say CA.

> Edit, because some google-impaired pendant will insist on a cite for common knowledge

"pedant" :)

Do you have a citation for "they hate us for us"?

Your chart shows Nevada, NJ, NH, MN and Connecticut as the top ones.

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

Your citation is fascinating! So many interesting comparisons. (Also, there's a non-Scribd link here: https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/ftsbs-timeseries... ).

I wish there was a graphical representation of the data (that wasn't too skewed by land area or population). It would also be nice if the absolute numbers were inflation-adjusted.

To address the issue, though, your citation shows that Texas is right in the middle of per-capita federal taxes at $6,437 per person, ranked 25th. I think it's more illuminating to look at per capita numbers, otherwise it's just a comparison of population. If anything, Connecticut residents paying $11,522 in taxes per person would revile Texans for not paying their fair share.

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