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Comment by splat | Hacker News Reader

I would guess that Delaware tops the list in paying more than is spent on it just because so many corporations are registered there, so the corporate income tax they pay appears to originate from Delaware. Minnesota in second place surprised me though.

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Minnesota is where a lot of credit card companies are based from. I believe that there was a Regan-era law(may have been earlier, not sure) that allowed multi-state credit card corporations to basically use their "home state" laws for everyone, rather than the individual state laws. MN, at the time, had very permissive laws for credit card regulation, so a lot of companies relocated to the Twin Cities.

Huh, I always associated that with the Dakotas (eg: http://resources.lawinfo.com/en/Articles/Credit-Card-Gift-Ca...). I can't find anything referring to that happening with Minnesota, and I haven't noticed a particularly large amount of that sort of activity here.

Oh, that's right. It was the Dakotas. Whoops!

This is surprising, do you have a link? Because the Minnesota phenomenon is interesting. I was able to find this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_based_in_Minn...

E.g., Norwest Bank (which bought Wells-Fargo), Target, and some others.

Note, the list is sorted by "sum paid - sum spent as % of gdp".. in the gross, it seems that NY tops it.

I suspect that's partly due to its proximity to Winnipeg; a great deal of the cross-border traffic with Canada flows through MN. But MN has a disproportionate number of big industrial companies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Minnesota

Looking at the states, I think corporate headquarters might be a big part of it. Why else would Arkansas be on the list of net givers? (And Minnesota has a relatively many corporate headquarters.)

If you're going to downvote a neutral comment like this, it would help to explain why.

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