Analysis Where the money to states is going in the coronavirus relief bill

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Analysis
Where the money to states is going in the coronavirus relief bill

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/12/where-money-states-is-going-coronavirus-relief-bill/

By Philip Bump
March 12, 2021 at 4:45 p.m. CST

Among the provisions of the pandemic relief bill signed into law by President Biden on Thursday is a large pool of money going to states to offset revenue shortfalls that accompanied the slowdown in economic activity last year. Some $350 billion will be divvied up between the 50 states, D.C. and the territories, funds meant to backstop state and local government programs and to pay for capital investments.

An article by the Hill, using data published by the House Oversight Committee, broke down where that money was expected to go. Unsurprisingly, most will go to more populous states. Also unsurprisingly, residents of smaller states will get more per capita.

Before we dig into it, it’s worth pointing out that the funding is going to address a problem that ended up not being as bad as was projected. The New York Times looked at how state revenue from April to December of 2020 compared to the same period the prior year, finding that just under half of states ended up seeing increases in revenue for a variety of reasons. Nor were shortfalls a blue-state problem, as many Republicans have claimed over the past year. Instead, more states that voted for former president Donald Trump last year ended up with shortfalls than did states that voted for Biden.

The two states with the biggest decreases were Alaska and Hawaii.


Note that in the chart above and in the next two charts, the circles are scaled to population (bigger circles show more populous states) and colored based on their 2020 vote (more red means more support for Trump and more blue, more support for Biden).

So where is the money going? Again, the four states expected to take in the most from the relief bill are California, Texas, New York and Florida, in that order — the four most populous states in the country. You can see on the chart below how the amount of money being disbursed correlates to population: All the circles at the bottom are tiny because the states getting that relatively small payout are ones without many people..........................