As some of you might recall, I tried to use the Tax Foundation’s 2005 analysis of which states are net contributors and which are net recipients of federal taxes and transfers. I wondered why the Tax Foundation hasn’t issued a new report. My understanding is that it is actually very hard to get a clear picture — how do we evaluate military spending, for example? — and so the Tax Foundation abandoned the effort rather than continue attaching their name to a problematic product. And how do we characterize a person who paid taxes in New York all her life and then moves to New Mexico shortly after she starts collecting Social Security benefits?

These methodological questions are vexing. As a friend pointed out to me, a GAO economist explained to him that there’s really no way to answer the Tax Foundation’s question without changing how core transfer programs operate.

Ezra Klein linked to the report, noting the following:

Over at the Fourth Branch, they’ve got a nice map showing the states that receive more than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes (which they’ve coded red), and the states that receive less than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes (which they’ve coded blue). Just to repeat: Red states are getting a good deal, and blue states a bad one.

Matt Yglesias offered strikingly different thoughts on the map. Apart from the methodological problem he cites, Yglesias adds:

My larger concern, however, is with the “ecological fallacy” of attributing the quality of whole states to specific individuals. There are millions of people in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, etc. who voted for Barack Obama. Those people are primarily lower income people. If we slashed federal spending on Medicaid, Title I education assistance, food stamps, etc. and used the savings to cut taxes on high income individuals then “Alabama” and “Arkansas” would suffer while “New Jersey” and “Connecticut” would gain. But at an individual level, low-income people would lose and high-income people would win. So there’s nothing really irrational about a well-to-do businessman in Mobile voting for tax cuts, or a poor person in Newark voting for anti-poverty programs.

Yglesias is making sense. I’d only add that you don’t just have to a poor person in Newark to have a powerful incentive to vote for transfers — if 60 percent of U.S. households are net recipients of federal benefits, a middle income person also has an incentive. Affluent blue states are net contributor in large part due to two-earner households, many of whom maintain relatively high incomes, often with great difficulty, in order to have a middle class standard of living in high-cost metropolitan areas.