Share of Personal Income from Government Transfers by US County

Posted by AshleyMyers44

16 Comments

  1. Notice a pattern? Rural, conservative areas are getting the most government income. Lol.

  2. Sarcastic_Backpack on

    Government transfers = Handouts. If you’ve ever taken one of these without it being the absolute last resort, shame on you!

  3. The yellow counties in the Florida Peninsula (I don’t know anything about the Panhandle) are full of retirees from the north collecting social security and pensions they “earned” in another state.

  4. I’m in Oktibbeha County in Mississippi where MSU is and this map has us coded in the moderate category. I am literally paid from USDA and NOAA money along with all of the other bazillion dollars that come into the university from the feds. How was this data tabulated?

    Overall I know Mississippi gets a lot of federal dollars. Stennis Space Center on the coast with NASA’s test stands and the Navy’s super computers, Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, ERDC in Vicksburg with their research and super computers, and us lowly universities with federal contracts.

  5. This is dumb, it’s just a map of age and poverty. Social Security (age), Medicare (age), and Medicaid (income) make up around 90% of govt transfers. So it’s just showing counties with more old people and more poor people. And expressing the transfers as a share of total income rather than in absolute dollars just biases it even more against poorer counties with lower avg incomes.

    A much better map would show the per capita, absolute amount of unearned material govt benefits. Not retirement income from a system that a worker paid into, not insurance, but cash (Supplemental Security Income, TANF, Tax credits), food (SNAP, WIC), and housing (public and section 8 vouchers). That’s what most people are thinking of when they talk about of welfare.

  6. Total share of personal income is probably a bad metric. I’m assuming it’s (gov’t payments)/(total income). You only need a few extremely high earners to skew the data. For example, a million people could get $40k a year from the gov’t, but there’s one dude bringing in $400m a year. That’s only 10%. This is likely what’s happening in metropolitan areas. It’d be more interesting to see the % of people receiving any government transfers.

  7. TralfamadorianZoo on

    Remember this map when rural people say urbanites shouldn’t get to decide elections.

  8. We need a rule for source data in this sub. I’m not even certain what/how this is calculated. I’m guessing it treates all government transfers towards someone as a positive and ignores all taxes, duties, fees, etc which would be negative. It’s this overall percentage, on a per person relative value, or so forth?

    Is this social security, Medicare, WIC, farm subsidies…