Being in a donor state

[ritaxis]

Apparently, if you're going to post a poll, you have to post it before you put in the content that leads up to it.

To restate what I had written before my poll-writing ate my post, something that bugs me from time to time is the way that California and New York get shafted in the national arena. It's natural for the more prosperous states to give more than they get. I'm not complaining about that. That would be stupid. It would be unacceptable for each state to get proportionately what they give to the country -- it would result in the poorest and most rural states having nothing much worth having but their own natural beauty and folklife, which is small consolation when you're starving and you have no infrastructure. This would not benefit California or New York in any way. We're all part of the same country (this reasoning also applies to the world, but the rest of this does not, since the prosperous nations are not getting world treatment that is analogous to the treatment California and New York get in the US).

The thing that pisses me off is the active hostility that politicians cultivate towards California and New York (and other urban, urbane, productive states). They go out of their way to harm us in small ways and large ones. They slander us.
They cultivate rifts between us and other states which share some of our interests. They routinely short us funding and kill projects which might somehow aid us. In pre-election times, they hit up our state for fundraisers and then don't even bother to promise us anything in return. The Calitics blog is monitoring this and raising the discussion.

Just for curiosity's sake I checked out Homeland Security funding by state, and I lucked into a listing. Following is the poll I made -- look up the answers after you've made your guesses, okay? Or in the middle or something. The link to the site is at the end of the poll, just to help you be honest.



[Poll #952121]

Now that you've done the poll, go see the answers on this cool interactive map which will tell you how much per capita all the states get.

Comments

[blackoakdreams.livejournal.com]

I was not the least bit shocked to discover Virginia and Maryland were two of the highest Homeland Security funded states. They bracket the capital, after all, and defense to those states in a very real way defends the nerve center of the nation. Wyoming, however, threw me. Also, you have the same argument that led to the creation of our congress, whether we should think of our country in terms of states or in terms of population. Either has its merits, and looking at this funding in absolute terms, California almost has to kick the crap out of everyone short of Texas. Small states look at those big numbers, and cry elitism or whatever the nonsense is called nowadays. And since small states are the backbone of the President's support...

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I skipped the poll and went straight to the "cool interactive map", which, as I suspected, was the usual abomination of information design that hides context instead of showing it. Click on a state, window reveals total and per-capita; click on another state, window reveals total and per-capita; click on another state... do this fifty times, write the answers down, and type them back into a computer, and you will have created, at great effort, the table they ought to have given in the first place. A scatter graph would be nice, but given a table I could have ripped one off myself in minutes. Without a table, I'm at sea. Click on a state...

I can't help thinking that such gadgets are carefully-designed understanding prevention devices, which shouldn't be the case if the organization in question is interested in promoting understanding. I rummaged around the site a bit, and was disappointed but not surprised to see the usual signs of incompetent infographics, a dull single line graph (which shoots off the top of the scale), and the classic three-dimensional color pie chart.

There seems to be a database you can query, but you have to drill down to state level before you get any information. Again, you need to do this fifty times if you want to compare states. There seems to be nothing there about Homeland Security spending.

nationalpriorities.org needs to get over itself and just hand over the data.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

You're right: see my next post on this subject.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I'm familiar with this kind of thing locally. Northern Virginia provides almost all the money to the state treasury and gets back about a quarter of what they put in.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It's true for urbanized areas in general. I'll repeat: this is to some degree as it should be. If the rural areas aren't supported by the urban areas, we all suffer -- agriculture needs to be supported, mining, and wilderness, among other things. And we don't need an exacerbation of the diaspora effect of rural poverty, and we don't need our countrymen to suffer. But. We should be honest about the interdepence, and acknowledge what we do for each other. And not valorize country folk to an absurd degree, and not demonize city folk.