Federal Spending On Each State Compared With The Taxes It Pays, Visualized

You might think that the federal spending allocated to each state would be roughly equivalent to the amount of federal taxes state residents pay. Turns out that's really not the case.

Using data from 2017, this graph by personal finance site HowMuch shows there's actually a huge discrepancy between the federal spending received by each state and the federal taxes its residents pay. In Virginia, for instance, taxpayers paid an average of $10,571 in federal taxes, but the federal government actually sent back a whopping $20,872 per person in federal expenditures.

In fact, according to HowMuch, 40 out of 50 states actually receive more federal spending than they pay in federal taxes. The few states where this isn't the case include Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Connecticut contributed $15,462 in federal taxes per capita and only got $11,462 per person from the federal government, making it the state with the biggest net negative gap between federal taxes and federal spending.

[Read more at HowMuch]