Jayne: We’ll sure miss you, Kentucky

That’s what happens when you live in a federal republic. Some people pay more in taxes than they receive back in government investment; some people pay less. Usually, we view this as the cost of living together, of having shared values, of making sacrifices to enhance the lives of our fellow Americans. When your neighbor sprains their ankle, after all, you help them up.

But not anymore. With the Trump administration pretending to identify waste and taking a chain saw to federal jobs and expenditures, those days apparently are over. According to Elon Musk — whose companies have received $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits over the past two decades, according to The Washington Post — we no longer can afford to help each other. Not if it means raising taxes on billionaires.

So maybe it’s time to say goodbye to Kentucky. And to West Virginia, Mississippi and South Carolina. And to sell Alaska back to Russia, which would make sense under Trump’s infantile ethos but might not make Alaskans happy.

And in looking at the list of which states are suckling at the teat of government and which ones are carrying their own weight, a fascinating pattern emerges.

Of the 12 most federally dependent states, 11 voted for Trump last year. New Mexico is the outlier, preferring Kamala Harris despite ranking sixth in dependency. In addition to the aforementioned states, Louisiana, Arizona, Indiana, Alabama, South Dakota and Wyoming rank in the top 12, receiving more in federal funding than they pay despite their boot-strappy philosophy.

For the record, Washington ranks 44th in dependency, contributing far more to the federal coffers than it receives. And California, which has become the bogeyman of conservative fever dreams, ranks 49th. Despite the portrayal of California as a socialist hellscape, the state has a larger gross domestic product than the United Kingdom, France and some 180 other countries.

As Lucy Dadayan of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center told WalletHub: “States like Alabama and Mississippi receive a higher share of federal funding relative to their tax contributions, while wealthier states like California and New York effectively subsidize others. This redistribution helps ensure that lower-income states can maintain essential public services.”

While Americans can argue over what constitutes “essential,” it is confounding that so many people vote against their own self-interests. It is confounding that voters would willfully slash their own services as long as transgender people and undocumented immigrants have their rights rolled back.

But vote they did, driven by misguided beliefs that government should be run like a business and that the bottom line defines value. We’re sure the people of Kentucky will understand.