Yes, absolutely. Generally, red states are deeply tax negative, receiving as much as four times as much funding back as they put in, and blue states are tax positive, getting as little as half the money they put in. The trend-buckers on this are DC and New Mexico which are blue but tax negative to various degrees (NM being at like $1.01 or $1.02 per dollar paid in, DC being the most dramatically supported at around $4 per dollar, although if it achieves statehood and the National Capital Service Area is removed it becomes tax positive) and Utah, the only actually tax positive red state (around $0.86 per dollar iirc), all funding accounted for. Any site that tells you otherwise is (usually intentionally) leaving out something, usually medicare, social security, or TANF.

Historical conservative talk of decoupling from blue states, pushing away from federal funding, "taking back" their tax money, etc. has always been deeply cynical as they knew that without those federal funds propping them up, they go belly up in a matter of weeks to months. Unfortunately, a lot of the new generation of politicians are true believers who genuinely believe their party lines at face value and we're going to see some serious :surprised-pika: over the next few years.

Source: me remembering stuff from grad school.

I think the overwhelming militaristic police presence in even rural areas is a bit of a chaos factor that might make our situation here unique.

The big "problem" Americans have is that they can very easily move between states. A downturn in a single state doesn't create a hot-house of poverty that culminates in a collective response, because residents simply scatter to the four winds in pursuit of growing economies in other regions.

Incidentally, this has created a ratchet that drives young people into the urban areas and leaves rural counties as these massive retirement communities. The crash in land-value that this creates sets up an opportunity for developers to scope up real estate on the cheap and throw up new developments, which feeds suburbanification. And that cycle has been playing out for 60 years, with urban centers sprawling outward as rural neighborhoods are abandoned, chewed up, and gentrified by state-subsidized private developers.

But now that the Second Wave Baby Boom (ie, Millennials) aren't maintaining population growth and immigration is increasingly difficult, there aren't enough young people to keep selling demolished and redeveloped exurban real estate to. So the rural areas aren't getting redeveloped and the gentrification frontier is retreating back to the urban core.

Young poor people are concentrating in the cities. Urban sprawl isn't dissipating the social pressures like it used to. And so we're left with a larger and larger police presence as a stop-gap to a dissintegrating system.

I agree, that's probably not going to end in balkinization. But I can absolutely see a New American Apartheid system, where we start building walls and cutting highways across the interior in order to corral and confine internally displaced people.

I think the "string of pearls" prediction is still the most salient, you have "islands" of entrenched political power and capital heavily policed and protected from the rapidly deteriorating social conditions of the "peripheries" around between. Rural / ex-burban areas largely defined by a patchwork of overlapping local authorities and jurisdictions like some kind of new-millenium HRE.

It would be 1.20075 billion

Yeah, the Tennessee metropoles are not much different from any other metropoles. This is targeted at them by the over represented rural districts with one guy who's been on the ballot for 30 years.