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I was watching a recent debate between Destiny and Actual Justice Warrior (AJW) and around 1 hour 24 minutes Destiny fact checks a claim from AJW on the federal budget/spending in Kentucky.
Here is the fact check from Destiny on federal spending in Kentucky:
I'm not going into the argument between Destiny and AJW since my question is more on Kentucky federal spending data and fact checking. I believe the data Destiny mentioned comes from usaspending.gov which by all accounts is a reputable and reliable source, that provides information and transparency on federal spending in the United States. But where I start running into issues with this data is that this numbers here don't necessarily match up with numbers I see in other sources:
Usafacts.org says Kentucky received $3576.43 per capita in federal assistances in 2020, their source is the US Census Bureau.
According to the urban institute, which seems to be a pretty reputable nonpartisan thinktank:
If you take 32.20% (the percentage of state revenue that is federal funds of Kentucky in 2020) and multiply that against the $10,203 per capita number from 2021 (yes I know 2021 and 2020 is not the same but there shouldn't be that large of a gap between the two years) you get $3570.014 per capita, which closely matches up. Other articles on Kentucky state funding seems to match this value much more than the value that you see on usaspending.gov.
So I looked more at the data from usaspending.gov and I start to see data that seems to bring up more questions. The data suggests that per capita, Kentucky people receive $34,552 YEARLY in federal assistance. This is an absurdly high value! Most of that amount comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. I looked at other state's data that rank high in terms of federal assistance:
I only looked at the top 10 states based on their dependency on the federal government and Kentucky is a clear outlier. On the dependency ranking Kentucky ranks 5th, which is pretty high, but based on the numbers here I'd imagine it should be even higher.
As I examined Kentucky's data, I start to see other things that seem off. Jefferson county received $110.40B, or 71.73% of the entire state's funding. The next highest was Fayette county, at $2.61B. Jefferson county has a population of around 770,000, while Fayette has around 320,000. So I should expect to see a roughly 2:1 ratio, but here we see a 42:1 ratio instead. That means people in Jefferson county are getting roughly $152,857 per capita. The occum's razor answer would be that there is missing data, somehow the award counts got misattributed 100% to Jefferson county rather than being allocated properly, but in light of the extremely high $34,552 value I'm wondering if the data is correct at all. I did a quick spot check on the other states and their county percentage to population ratios seemed to match up.
So what am I missing exactly? Why are the numbers in USASpending.gov so high compared to other numbers that I've seen? Why is Kentucky's numbers so high? There must be something obvious I'm missing but I don't know what that something is. Is the US Government really spending that much money on Kentucky, and specifically Jefferson county?
Jefferson County is basically Louisville, and it's a major transportation nexus in a particularly fucked-up bit of geography, so it's not surprising for it to be a bit higher, plus I think there's a couple big companies like Humana that show up under Louisville but aren't really spent in or on that location. Even with that, these numbers look jank, as does the extent it's all set as "multiple recipients" under mostly HHS funding -- there's reasons to suspect older and unhealthier populace there, but not that unusually so.
Sorting awards by Direct Payment in Jefferson County for FY2023 and 2024 shows a lot of Medicaid awards in the 1b-9.5b range, nearly 90b of them. By place of performance, Jefferson County (112.2b) is literally orders of magnitude higher than any other county (and an order of magnitude higher by congressional district), in the state. The only nearby comparable countries in total spending are Marion County Illinois (ok, Chicago I can believe), Cumberland County, Pennsylvania (wtf?), and Richmond County, South Carolina (Prisma and Blue Cross / Blue Shield), which points away from a particularly sick local population.
My guess is that there's a number of companies headquartered or having technical place-of-performance in those counties, but with the effects of that spending (and likely the actual anything-but-paper spending) occurring in a far more distributed manner.
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