Monday, June 22, 2020

Add Federal Intergovernmental Transfers for Individual States

Up to now, usgovernmentspending.com has shown so-called "intergovernmental transfers" for displays of spending for the gross finances of all states, but not for individual states.

But the Census Bureau publishes, in its Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, numbers for intergovernmental transfers, both for all states together in the United States as a whole, and for each individual states.

In response to a request from a user, usgovernmentspending.com now shows intergovernmental transfers for individual states. But the amount is shown as a value of federal spending and as a negative value of intergovernmental transfer. This is done to avoid double counting, because the proceeds of each intergovernmental transfer is already shown in the spending on programs at the state and local level.

For instance, for education spending for Alabama in 2017, the latest year with data, we show:

$ billionFederalGov. Xfer.StateLocalTotal
Education1.69-1.696.227.9414.16

But there is a problem. The total shown in the Historical Table 12.3 in the Federal Budget for federal grants to state and local governments is not the same as the amount of intergovernmental transfers. For instance, in 2017 the Feds show total education grants to states and local governments at $57.3 billion, but the total of education intergovernmental transfers in the Census Bureau data under code B21 is $90.7 billion. Right now, we do not know what the difference means.

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