5 ms·
XKCD relevant once again: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
by nightcracker 9y ago
XKCD relevant once again: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- rukittenme 9y agoExcept that's not what's happening since different dynamics are in play. Florida takes in $2bn more than Texas but has 7 million fewer people. They should have have done $/pop but this is definitely not a population heat map.
- bpodgursky 9y agoPeople retire to Florida. If you don't control very carefully for stuff like social security, that's a useless metric, since those people paid taxes in a different state while younger.
- dkhenry 9y agoI think you could make the metric useful by filtering out Social Security and Medicare which come from different revenue sources then the General Fund. At that point a direct population comparison becomes much more useful
- catawbasam 9y agoWhy would you ignore 2 of the largest spending categories?
- dkhenry 9y agotwo reasons. 1. Their funding doesn't come out of discretionary spending, they self fund through individual taxes. 2. Their outlays go mainly to older people who have a tendency to group in specific states, and due to the size of the expenditure relative to the rest of the budget even a small bias in where that money goes overshadows any real variance in discretionary spending
- valuearb 9y agoBut they didn't pay enough taxes, social security is a huge subsidy of our wealthiest people, the elderly.
- catawbasam 9y agoMany of them could still be working and paying in rather than taking money out.
- sctb 9y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14301241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14301241 and marked it off-topic.