That federal spending is done perpetually at a budget deficit though. Is it so difficult to believe that a state couldn't also figure out how to build a money printer?
Yes. There's a reason US dollars are accepted worldwide Zimbabwean dollars aren't.
Once states secede, they lose all the clout that comes from being part of the world's only superpower controlling the world's reserve currency. Southern states would be better off switching to Pesos than printing their own.
Russia, which has a similar GDP, didn't have any appreciable external debts denoted in rubles. They were denoted in dollars, pounds sterling or other hard currencies.
> The Census numbers are much higher than the OECD numbers for a variety of reasons. In fact, the OECD income number of the US is only 59 percent of the Census number.
The adjustment they did was "moving all the medians of all the states down by 59%" but I don't think that is enough. A more appropriate way to compare things would have been figuring how what those "differentiating reasons" and deducing amounts for each of the states, or incrementing the other countries' median in the same way. The American Census could (for example) be counting every state's natural resources as part of each household's income. In that case, they should include Sweden's petrol reserves in that computation. With the disparate measurement methods and the simplistic adjustment, they are comparing apples to oranges.
To be clear, that adjustment can only affect the relative numbers across US states, not the overall average for US states. That is because all states are adjusted by the OECD number for the US. Presumably the OECD methodology is consistent within itself.
So maybe the Census includes oil resources and OECD doesn’t. Discounting the US numbers across the board to 59% may make Texas and California artificially look better than Mississippi. But the overall average of the US states would still correspond to the OECD number for the US, which presumably is computed the same way as for Sweden.
More on topic, those poor states that benefit from federal money would not have a very strong economy and they would not be able to do deficit spending on their own currency or pay for things through deficit spending. If Oregon, Washington and California formed a new country or joined Canada they'd be better off financially, because their tax drain to poor state america would end. I don't want a split but I'm starting to feel it will happen in my lifetime. I'm more than ok with helping the poorer states with their infrastructure needs, we are all in this together. But I'm tired of 15% of the population having control over the federal agenda through the senate.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...