Red states can justifiably ask whether federal grants are truly benefiting them.
Regarding “Republican States Are ‘Wards of Washington’” (Letters, Feb. 12): Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques note that taxes raised in wealthy blue states help subsidize red states’ budgets. The subtext: Republicans shouldn’t complain about Democrats’ profligacy with federal grants.
But red states can justifiably ask whether such grants are truly benefiting them. Even with some revenue transfers between states, federal grant money is largely raised from taxes on citizens in the same states that receive it. In practice the federal government taxes state residents, routes the money through Washington, takes a cut off of the top for the federal bureaucracy and returns the sum to states with restrictions on how they can spend it.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
Photo by Andrey Denisyuk/Getty Images