Sidenote: The best part of Trump's "Mutiny on the Bounty" tweet is that he compared himself to Captain Bligh... the bad guy in the story. What a dipshit. This is what I always thought, too. And now we have the Republican Party's current incarnation, Fox and OAN "news", and the opioid epidemic. In effect, the coastal states are subsidizing the stupidity in this country. If each state was allowed to proceed more on their own, without being subjugated to various Dept of Commerce policies, they'd be allowed to fail colossally and by their own hand, instead of being propped up by socialist wealth redistribution programs funded by the coastal states. There's a lot in that statement, I know. But if even HALF of the states had to stand on their own two legs, and operate fully within their own programs and policies - without being bailed out by California and New York's economies - then they would fail. It's time for these people to feel the real repercussions of their voting actions. I'm ready to kick them out of the basement and make them go out, get a job, and live on their own. I mean... they are in their 30's and still living in their mom's basement! :-) Clearly we need something to change, but on the other hand we need the administrative state to be as big as it is to administer most of the programs that help people.
I did some digging and as it turns out, CA isn't a donor state. Connecticut is the biggest (per capita), and NY is high up there, too, but CA has a slight balance (some sources had it slightly plus and some slightly minus--probably depends on how you count). My guess is that part of it is the high number of people living in poverty combined with big military spending and lots of lucrative Silicon Valley contracts. But obviously CA contributes lot that is hard to measure, too. At least that highlights the difficulty of breaking things down that way. My home state (MI) is a good example of what can go wrong. When manufacturing was king, we were a huge donor state. Now we're a slight mooch (and of course this correlates nicely with disinvestment in our public ed). Shit ebbs and flows. I hate the mentality of the people who hate government but want handouts as much as anyone, but I also like to at least think we're all in it together. Otherwise we can keep breaking down the geography until it's my and my wife's side of the bed, and we're arguing over who put more money in the bank account this month. I think, obviously, a better solution is to help these terrorists figure out for themselves that investing in their public schools and universities would actually help themselves in the medium and long term. Don't know how you do that unless or until you can just redefine everyone as "white" and then they won't have to get pissy about "giving" money to mexicans and blacks.