I just got back from a Minnesota state DFL (Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party) caucus and a few things left me with a bad taste. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the same district’s Republican caucus, which is full of braindead Trumpers and worse. Still, a state Senate candidate, who I generally like, said some dumb stuff about the Twin Cities, mainly claiming that St. Paul is hoarding tax revenue that should be going to rural areas. I kept quiet because I hadn’t looked at those numbers for a while, but later I refreshed my knowledge of who pays taxes in Minnesota and who gets the benefits.
The fact is that the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area contributes about two-thirds of the total state tax collections, according to 2021 Minnesota Department of Revenue data. That same area accounts for about 57% of the state's taxpayers, which means Minnesota’s major urban area receives about eighty-six cents in services for every tax dollar paid. Minneapolis alone generates roughly 3.5 times more in state tax revenue (income, corporate, and sales) than it receives back in state aid. Minneapolis currently ranks highest among peer cities for the percentage of its own city income derived from property taxes, at approximately 48%. State taxes for Minneapolis and St. Paul are expected to contribute $7.72 billion in net receipts, paid to the state's General Fund, for the first quarter of FY 2026. The other successful semi-urban city in Minnesota, Rochester, gets shafted almost as hard as Minneapolis. Dying cities like Duluth are better off, but that historical out-of-proportion state and federal support is finally declining as the city continues to shrink from its 1960 all-time population high of 107,312 to its current of about 88,000.
Another way to look at state taxation equity is that the rural areas of the state get $1.30 in state services for every dollar paid in taxes. That is almost exactly the same kind of unequal returns, on taxes paid, that most blue states suffer and most red states benefit from. In other words, the “failing” parts of the state (aka “Greater Minnesota”) are getting regular welfare checks from the successful cities. And the part that pisses me off is, like Republican states who consistently receive a positive return, in federal aid, rural Minnesota not only gets more than it deserves but it is angry that it isn’t getting more.
Practically every aspect of rural Minnesota life is paid for by taxpayers in the Twin Cities: schools, healthcare, roads, clean water, sewer, and all infrastructure, including internet access and, even, telephone service. And the thanks urban taxpayers get is more whining about the pitiful quality of life in areas of the state that are hostile to education, science, technology, and medicine, while being totally dependent on all of those things, mostly supplied by Minnesota’s state government at the expense of urban taxpayers.
A few years ago, I spent a week in Detroit taking a class from one of the city’s many fantastic maker groups. In my spare time, I took a “Beautiful Ruins of Detroit” tour and, at the end of the tour, our guide took us to areas of the city that had been completely razed to the ground and rebuilt as urban agriculture centers. After seeing the awful damage “globalization” and economic predators like Betsy DeVos’ family had done to the once-great hub of American manufacturing, we toured neighborhood hydroponic and enclosed, passively heated greenhouses and even small fully-enclosed mobile structures for raising chickens and pasture-raised, antibiotic and steroid-free cattle and pigs being raised for local consumption. At last count, Detroit has about 2,200 urban farms and gardens focused on local sustainability and food sovereignty.
The only claim to state and federal rural welfare checks has always been “we grow the food you eat.” Even though that is, largely, untrue, since roughly 55% of fresh fruit, 32% of fresh vegetables, and over 70–85% of seafood of the “food we eat” is imported and California provides more than one-third of all U.S. vegetables and roughly three-quarters of its fruits and nuts. In fact, California is the source of nearly half of the country’s total produce.
US taxpayers cough up as much as $20 billion annually to subsidize corn and soybeans, which are mostly export and low-efficiency fuel crops. For most of us, especially those trying to remain healthy, corn and soybeans are not “food.” Certainly, the corn grown for animal food, undesirable and unhealthy “food products” (filler), diabetes-inducing corn syrup, and saturated with herbicides and insecticides is not food and most of us want it out of our groceries. Corn grown for fuel is just an agricultural welfare check.
On top of that, U.S. taxpayers put out approximately $38 billion annually to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, another export crop since US meat consumption has been dropping for years. Put that money into "animal-free" (plant-based or cultivated) meat, currently totally unsubsidized, and you’ve put the knife even deeper into the heart of urban dependency on food production. Rural welfare recipients are so worried about this “attack” on their “way of life” that Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas have passed laws banning cell-cultured meat. Just imagine what some of those states would look (and smell) like without acres and acres of feedlots, rendering plants, packing plants, and animal waste “fertilizer” stinking up the state. That’s what those states are trying to protect and the rest of us would like to see disappear.
Keep that in mind the next time you hear a politician babbling about “income distribution.” 99% of livestock in the United States is factory-farmed and U.S. farming is rapidly becoming a corporate venture, with the “family farm” designation becoming more of a farce every year. The USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) defines a family farm as “any farm organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation. Family farms exclude farms organized as nonfamily corporations or cooperatives, as well as farms with hired managers.” Under this definition, a multi-million-dollar corporation, managed by cousins who own slightly more than 50% of the corporation, is a "family farm." The term masks the shift toward industrial-scale agriculture, where large-scale family farms (which can be thousands of acres) account for a significant portion of production. Those corporate “farmers” are who bawls the loudest when their “way of life” is threatened by economic and societal changes and any reduction in their corporate welfare checks.
Personally, I can’t wait for those people to be cut loose, entirely, by independent, self-reliant cities producing their own food and keeping their resources to themselves until rural goobers admit they need assistance to survive and get cut down to size. Eventually, the US will have to become an actual representative democracy or it will, and should, be broken into smaller nations with the “haves” becoming democratic and the rest going their own backwards, regressive way.
