Technically, the US worked just fine, before there were fiscal transfers. What's really the case here is that a social safety net in the presence of migration

Technically, the US worked just fine, before there were fiscal transfers. What's really the case here is that a social safety net in the presence of migration can't be done on a state by state basis. It has to be national, which invariably results in net flows between states. A lot of measures of interstate transfers mistakenly treat federal spending as a transfer. Really it's trade. A small percentage could be counted as a transfer.