Political bacon hard to weigh

Posted by David Lightman at 11:00 am CDT

Ned Lamont, the Greenwich businessman challenging Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic Senate primary, is charging Lieberman is not effectively helping pump federal dollars into the state. In fact, Lamont says, Connecticut ranks 49th by one measure of federal spending per capita.

True by one measure, but trying to figure out whether Connecticut or any other state gets a generous or skimpy amount of money from the federal government is difficult-and it’s easy to make either argument.

This much is clear: “The factors that drive federal spending are largely beyond any individual's control,” said Matt Kane, economist for the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a Washington research group.

Much of the federal money going to states depends on formulas. A state with a less wealthy population, for instance, could get more funds from social programs designed to help the poor. A state with a disproportionate share of elderly residents would benefit more from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid payments.

Not even a president has a great impact on spending. In 2000, the year before President Bush took office, Texas ranked 36th in federal spending received per dollar of tax that residents paid. That rank has not changed.

By that measure, Connecticut ranks 49th, about the same place it’s been since the early 1990s, according to data from the Tax Foundation, a Washington research group.

But that figure masks some positive news about Connecticut’s federal money. In 2004, the last year data are available, Connecticut got about $30.3 billion from Washington, placing it a healthy eighth in federal spending per capita.

About one-third came from defense-related items and other procurement, and $7.8 billion involved retirement and disability payments.

At the same time, because the state is unusually wealthy, it had the highest per capita federal tax burden in the nation. As a result, the state got 66 cents back for every dollar it paid, and hence its place in the 49th spot.

“In some states, Connecticut being the poster child, there’s no act of federal largesse that can ever equal the vast sums of taxes high income people fork over as a result of the progressive income tax,” said William Ahern, Tax Foundation communications director.

A member of Congress could only influence the tax or spending figures at the margins, and again, it's difficult to say what if any impact an individual could have.

Lieberman has been a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which writes defense legislation, since 1993-the first Connecticut senator since the early 1960s to sit on the panel--giving him unusual influence over spending that could benefit Connecticut. But he's a Democrat, which means he's been in the Senate minority most of the last 11 years, giving him less clout over that spending.

“About the only way you'd have a huge impact is if you could go in and change how Medicare and Medicaid dollars are spent,” said Kane, “and no one's going to be able to do that.”

(Lightman is Washington bureau chief of the Hartford Courant, a sister paper to the Chicago Tribune.)