https://www.newsweek.com/new-ussr-union-socialist-states-red-opinion-1674129 Comrade McConnell, Turtle face, and his GOPers have been the real champions of redistributing wealth in a way that takes money from those who pay a much bigger share of the federal tax burden and channels it to those who shoulder considerably less in federal taxes are Mitch McConnell and his Republican red state "comrades." It is the blue states like New York, California, Connecticut and Massachusetts which pay into the federal government far greater amounts of federal tax revenue than what they get back from the federal government. Moreover, it is states like McConnell's home state of Kentucky that pay far less in taxes to the federal government than what they actually get back. According to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, which measures so called state balance of tax payments—how much each state pays in taxes to the federal government versus what the federal government grants and spends in each state—over a 5-year period New York taxpayers, for instance, have paid in $142.6 billion more to the federal government than they have gotten back from the feds in money distributed to the state. On the other hand, taking Mitch McConnell's Kentucky, that state received $63 billion more in payments from the federal government than its citizens paid in taxes to Washington. To break that down on an individual citizen basis, on average a New Yorker is paying $1,172 more to the federal government than is being spent by the federal government per person in the state; whereas, in Kentucky on a per capita basis they are getting $14,153 more per capita returned to the state than they are paying in federal taxes. This red state favorable balance of payments redistribution whereby the state gets more back than it pays in, benefits big and small red states alike—from the biggest one like Texas, to midsize states like Louisiana, to smaller ones like North and South Dakota and Wyoming., There is nothing new about this data. It has been true for a long time. What is remarkable is that even states like Texas with a huge economy get back more than they send to the federal coffers. Yet, Texas Senator Ted Cruz throws around the "socialist" attack on blue state Democrats as much as anybody. So, one can surmise the way Republicans see it, as long as you are redistributing income back to their state disproportionally it is not wealth redistribution socialism, but if it is money going to lower and middle-class citizens as part of a social safety net then it is.
They get away with it because their political opponents, like me, appreciate the virtues of more equitable distribution of wealth.
