The author of this article should be ashamed of himself. He failed to do basic research about how money is actually distributed. If he did, he would have found out about the Federal Reserve distribution system, the structure of which is based upon population distribution. Then he links this map to cell phone data, and then ignores the fact that cell phone towers are placed where people live — it should not be a surprise that people place local calls far more often then they do long distance calls. Then at the end of the article, he has the nerve to say "These are the first maps that are trying to paint us the way we actually are." This ignores the fact that there have been several proposals for alternative states for many years. See ‭[1] [2][3][4] (in 3, someone asks the author of one such proposal about the similarity of his plan to Federal Reserve system.)

If he wanted to do some interesting research, he would have asked to man who tracked dollar bills to ignore bills that were spent locally and instead track bills that traveled a considerable distance outside of their Federal Reserve District, because long distance cash transactions have become increasingly rare in the age of credit cards. Furthermore, that are the most likely to use cash are usually the poor, who are the least likely (except for the very rich, who don't carry cash on them at all) to use a computer and spend their time tracking where their cash has been.

[1] http://www.tjc.com/38states/

[2] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/boundary/bibliography.html#16-state

[3] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/region/question.html

[4] http://www.rev.net/~aloe/boundary/

EDIT: Added information about alternative state suggestions.