AG's Scratchin' Post

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Washington’s Next Big Decision: Bail Out the States or Not?.

http://blogs.wsj.com/capitaljournal/2010/12/08/washingtons-next-big-decision-bailout-the-states-or-not/

One commentor posted:

Anonymous wrote:
.In 2005 the state of California paid over $47 billion more in federal taxes than they received in benefits. Illinois has given tens of billions more than it has received from the federal government over the last 30 years. Now these states are in trouble, admittedly due to some poor planning, but to a much larger extent because they have had their money taken and redistributed to states who couldn’t have afforded their budgets without this windfall.

In 2005 these states received more federal dollars than taxes paid, the difference in parenthesis: Alabama (17.5 bil), Alaska (4.4 bil), Arizona (8.7 bil), Arkansas (6.4 bil), Georgia (3.9 bil), Hawaii (4.3 bil), Idaho (1.8 bil), Indiana (4.2 bil), Iowa (2.5 bil), Kansas (3 bil), Kentucky (12.4 bil), Louisiana (19.1 bil), Maine (3.1 bil), Maryland (6.6 bil), Mississippi (13.7 bil), Missouri (13.1 bil), Montana (2.5 bil), Nenraska (1.5 bil), New Mexico (10.8 bil), North Carolina (6.6 bil), North Dakota (2.8 bil), Oklahoma (8.1 bil), South Carolina (9.3 bil), South Dakota (2.6 bil), Tennessee (12.4 bil), Virginia (35 bil), West Virginia (7.2 bil), Wyoming (500 million),

The most important item is that these numbers are not 1 year discrepancies but in fact had been occurring for at least the previous 25 years!!!! So now, when the states who have been footing the bills for these moochers are in trouble, there is a whole lot of self-righteous indignation. The green states (states who give more in taxes than benefits received)have been a life line to the red states (the opposite of green states)for decades because their economies were able to generate revenues that could be shared. These green states, in general, still are the main economic engines of our economy. To think we could just let Illinois, California, New York … to fail is to be ignorant of the fact that if they did fail the pain would be felt well outside of those states.
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