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Blue State Bailout? Red State Residents Received Largest Stimulus Checks,
And Millions In Federal Aid

Blue state bailout? Any way you cut the data, the answer is much redder
Getty

As Congress starts to debate another coronavirus relief plan, there is widespread disagreement on myriad issues, including whether to include
sizable relief for states and another round of direct stimulus payments to Americans. With Democrats and Republicans already trading barbs -
including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling for a stop to
blue state bailouts - its worth looking at which states residents
benefited the most from the first round of stimulus checks as well as longstanding federal aid. ForbesSorry, Republicans Refuse To Budge On
Second Round Of Stimulus ChecksBy Shahar Ziv

The $2 trillion CARES Act passed by Congress in March provided for $1,200 stimulus checks to individuals, $2,400 to those filing jointly, and $500
for qualifying dependent children. The Treasury Department and Internal
Revenue Service (IRS) announced on Friday that over 130 million
individuals had received stimulus checks worth over $200 billion in the
past four weeks.

As discussed in a previous column, the IRS included a state-by-state
breakdown of economic impact payments, commonly known as stimulus
payments. The results are intriguing as there is significant variance in
the average amounts received by residents in each state. For example, qualifying Utah residents received payments averaging $1,944 while
Washington D.C. residents received only $1,385 on average. ForbesIRS Sends Stimulus Checks To 130 Million; Largest Average Payment Was $1,944 In This StateBy Shahar Ziv

To contextualize the payments within the current U.S. political landscape,
one can overlay the payments with how states have voted in Presidential elections since 2000. The results are clear and red: 19 of the 25 states
with the highest average stimulus payouts have voted Republican in every election since 2000.

19 of the 25 states with the highest average stimulus payouts have voted Republican in every ... More election since 2000 Copyright: Shahar Ziv
(using MapChart)

The higher up one cuts the data, the more concentrated the results are in
red states:

Top 25: 76% of the top 25 states that received the largest average
payments were red (19 are red states, 4 are purple, and 2 are blue);
Top 15: 80% are red states (12 are red states, 2 are purple, and 1 is
blue); Top 5: 100% are red states (Utah, Idaho, South Dakota,
Nebraska, and Wyoming)

Heres a table view of the data, shown in descending order of average
payment amount:

Table showing top 25 states sorted by largest average stimulus payment (as
of May 8, 2020) Copyright: Shahar Ziv

Longstanding Red State Bailout:

The skew of stimulus payments is not anomalous. Red states have been longstanding recipients of federal dollars. A report published by the Rockefeller Institute of Government estimates the distribution of federal receipts and expenditures across all fifty states. It includes several interactive tools showing how much money the federal government sends to
states and how much it collects from them.

Take New York and Kentucky as one comparison set, given the verbal
fisticuffs between New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, and Kentucky Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. According to the report, New York State
had a balance of payments deficit of close to $22 billion, meaning it sent
more in tax payments than it got back in federal spending in 2017; this
equates to getting back only 90 cents for every dollar it gives. Kentucky,
on the other hand, had a balance of payments surplus of over $45 billion;
this equates to taking $2.41 for every dollar it gave to the federal government.

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