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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (102501)	1/30/2009 12:58:36 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542169

How is Daniel Moynihan and Harvard? Moynihan did a long term study of who gets how much through Harvard. One of his long term agendas was to try to show that the unequal representation in the Senate was having deleterious effects on the country, though getting it reversed is nearly impossible. Lower populated rural states tend to benefit, highly populated urban states tend to suffer. query.nytimes.com New York Region Pays U.S. More Than It Gets, Study Finds By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM New York, New Jersey and Connecticut get substantially less money from the federal government each year than their residents pay in federal taxes, a study released today shows. By the same token, according to the study, Washington ships considerably more money to a group of states in the South than it receives from them in taxes. ''We need to rethink our system of federalism,'' said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, who has sponsored the study every year since he entered Congress in 1977. He offered no concrete view of what a new system should look like. The state-by-state analysis, conducted by professors at Harvard, covered tax payments and receipts of federal money in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, 1998. The main reason for the disparity is that residents of states with high per capita income pay much more on average in federal income taxes than do those of states where the income is lower. Connecticut has the highest per capita income in the country. New Jersey is second and New York is 13th. On the other side of the equation, federal money is distributed more evenly among the states, the study shows. The authors calculated that New Yorkers on average paid $5,676 in federal taxes in the 1998 fiscal year. The state received $4,840 per person in federal money for everything from Social Security checks to highway construction. The difference, $836, was called the balance of payments deficit, and it made New York the 13th worst-off state. Connecticut had the highest balance of payments deficit, and New Jersey was second. Senator Moynihan has no plan for how to change the situation. ''Hawaii,'' he said, ''has to have more naval bases than South Dakota.'' Rather, the state-by-state disparities, which have changed little over the years, give the senator ammunition for political debates. This year, the senator and his allies used the data successfully to fight off legislation that would have put a cap on how much any state could receive in transit assistance. The disparity in spending among the states is also a result in part of the ability over the years of Southern lawmakers to attain positions of influence on committees with control over federal projects. New Yorkers, by contrast, have tended to favor committees like judiciary and international relations with little money to distribute.