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Georgia Republicans in Congress are complaining about the way hundreds of billions of federal highway dollars are being allocated, and, on the surface, they have good reason to be upset. For every dollar Georgians pay in federal gasoline taxes, the state gets, at most, about 86 cents back in transportation funding.
That means that instead of funding much-needed highway and transit projects here at home, a good chunk of the tax money paid by Georgia motorists ends up building projects in places such as Alaska, which sucks up an astounding $7 for every $1 it pays in federal gasoline taxes. The new transportation bill pending in Congress, for example, contains up to $2 billion to build a bridge that would stretch from Anchorage across a bay to an undeveloped port area several miles away.
That absurdly expensive bridge to nowhere is testament to the power of two men: U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, and U.S. Rep. Don Young, an Alaska Republican who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Neither of the two is at all apologetic about the bill; in fact, Young even bragged to his home-state media that he "stuffed it like a turkey."
That's an outrage, of course. But once you start looking into it, this business of who gets what from the federal government turns up all kinds of interesting nuggets.
According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, for example, 33 states got more federal spending than they paid in federal taxes in 2002. That includes Georgia, but barely. For every dollar we paid the federal government, we got back $1.01 in federal expenditures. In other words, while our congressmen may have a valid complaint about transportation funding, overall we're treated pretty fairly.
New Mexico, with its disproportionately large Native American population, was the biggest of the "welfare states," collecting a tidy $2.34 in expenditures for every dollar it paid in federal taxes, followed closely by Alaska and Mississippi. The three states hardest hit were New Jersey, Connecticut and New Hampshire, which collected roughly 66 cents for each dollar that they paid in taxes.
Things really get interesting, though, when you start comparing tax contributions to political philosophy. For example, conservatives get a lot of mileage out of depicting themselves as rugged individualists, while liberals are supposedly eager to live off the government. Well, eight of the 10 biggest welfare states -- states that wrung a lot more out of Uncle Sam than they paid in federal taxes -- voted for George W. Bush in 2000. Conversely, of the 16 "donor states" -- states that paid a lot more in federal taxes than they got in return -- 12 voted for Democrat Al Gore.
In other words, the conservatives are right: The federal government does indeed act as an income redistribution system. But it takes money away from generally Democratic states and pays it to generally Republican states. The same is true at the congressional level. In 2000, according to an Associated Press computer analysis, districts that elected supposedly self-reliant, anti-government Republicans got an average of $621 million more in federal expenditures than districts that elected the supposedly government-reliant Democrats.
That phenomenon is mirrored at the state level here in Georgia. In the 2002 election, Gov. Roy Barnes and U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, both Democrats, carried metro Atlanta but were defeated by a surge of Republican votes in rural and small-town Georgia. Yet when it comes to education, transportation, health care and other programs, those supposedly small-government Republican areas are heavily subsidized by tax revenues from the very metro residents that they like to belittle as immoral spendthrifts.
In fairness, those areas truly need the help that state government can provide, just as states such as Mississippi need help from the federal government. It's just grating to hear elected leaders from those areas lecture the rest of us about self-reliance, even as they dip their hands into the public till.
Published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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