re: Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states?

quote:

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That's not what's being discussed here. We're talking about states and how/how much they send to the federal government and what they receive in return.

In my hypothetical, on the state of Wyoming's "ledger" there's a lot of federal dollars sent to Wyoming to manage federal lands there (federal government owns about half of Wyoming), but taxes generated by oil produced on the same land is credited as a funds outflow for California.

Does that make sense to you given what we're trying to measure?

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Yes, I understand what you are saying. I agree that you can't take the federal dependency rankings put out by various outlets at face value for the exact reason your example illustrated.

However, while your example demonstrates how those dependency figures can be skewed, particularly on the receipts-side, I'm not convinced that the collections-side would be materially impacted. I also think there is an argument to source the collections to the residence of the taxpayer, especially when looking at this from the perspective of where the money goes back.

But yeah, I agree it isn't a straightforward exercise. Of course, I also don't think posting a welfare spending per capita by state was particularly useful.