From Slate:

Want to know something funny about Taxachusetts? For every dollar it pays Uncle Sam in taxes, it receives only 79 cents back in federal services and subsidies. That ranks it 44th among the 50 states in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes. Indeed, there’s a very strong correlation between liberal, pro-government “blue states” and states that are least dependent on federal spending. There’s also a strong correlation between conservative, anti-government “red states” and states that are most dependent on federal spending. (Click here for details.) If you think of Red America as stubbornly self-reliant and Blue America as a drain on the Treasury, you’ve got it exactly backward.

The author also says “I don’t begrudge the South and the West their many military bases and national parks…” Maybe we don’t have any military installations on a huge scale, but we do have Hanscom Air Force Base, and numerous defense contractors, a club that iRobot of Roomba fame just joined. And MIT’s nickname could be “The House that DARPA Built” (MIT’s financials here; note that big 26.7% of revenue coming from Lincoln Labs, for starters).

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