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I recently wrote about the discrepancy between receipt of and support for federal spending among Tea Party supporters - 49% of Tea Party supporters, or members of their immediate families, are eligible for Social Security and/or Medicare, and yet 67% favor smaller government even if it "required cuts in spending on domestic programs such as Social Security, Medicare, education, or defense". Among the general population, only 15% are eligible for Social Security and/or Medicare, and only 29% support cutting those domestic programs.

After reflecting further on this discrepancy, I decided to look for discrepancies between conservative perspectives and the receipt of federal spending on a state-by-state level. I found the map first map above, which shows federal spending per dollar of federal taxes by state for FY 2004, and the second map above, which shows the party representation in the 111 U.S. Senate (elected in 2008), where Red = 2 Republican Senators (14, or 28%), Purple = 1 Republican Senator and 1 Democratic Senator (13, or 26%) and Blue = 2 Democratic Senators (23, or 46%, and I will lump in states with 1 Democratic Senator and 1 Independent Senator with the Blue states, to simplify things).

One of the things that struck me was that seven of the ten states with the lowest ratios of spending to tax dollars are blue states (the other three are purple states). The distribution of states with the highest ratios of spending to taxes is more closely aligned with the general distribution of red/purple/blue: 2 red states, 2 purple states and 6 blue states.

However, plugging the numbers into a spreadsheet and partitioning the average federal spending per dollar of federal taxes based on the party of representation in the U.S. Senate, I get the following results:

If we assume that Senators represent their constituents, and that Democratic Senators are generally more likely to support federal spending than Republican Senators, it appears that the states that receive the least federal spending per tax dollar contributed are the states that are most likely to support federal spending. And the states that are least likely to support federal spending are those which, on average, receive the most federal spending dollars per tax dollar paid.

Or, to put it another way, states benefiting the least from federal spending are most likely to support federal spending, and states benefiting the most from federal spending are the least likely to support federal spending.