These red state takers idea has propagated throughout social media, and become a talking point used anytime some fiscal argument breaks out between left and right.

And it's mostly absurd, because it just looks at net transfers between the states and Feds without realizing who is actually benefitting from that money.

How many small family farms do you think are left in much of the Midwest, who are living high on the hog with government subsidies, as the left likes to imagine?

Is it a transfer to Iowa or Nebraska when the federal government pays out a few billion in farm subsidies, which then goes straight into the pocket of fund managers in Manhattan, sovereign wealth funds, or megacorps who actually own the farms

How bout when Wall Street got bailed out in 2009 to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars? Do we count that as a subsidy to New York, Jersey, and Connecticut?

Even if the money was paid back, there's no way to calculate the trillions of dollars citizens of other states lost due to perpetually low interest rates or propping up houses in coastal areas at the expense of people living in low COL areas.

There's a dozen other ways we can measure these types of back door transfers, and I guarantee you, it ends up that those blue coastal states are getting a lot of extra subsidies that the silly stats that you guys use ignore.