[hirpslop]

American government cash transfers overwhelmingly skew rural with the caveat that income maintenance is a smaller slice of the pie.

This report illustrates rural cash transfers beautifully: https://eig.org/great-transfermation/

[codinghorror]

The largest chunk of federal "cash transfers" is not welfare; it is retirement and disability spending. The rural population is significantly older than the urban population.

Bear in mind that rural poverty rates (~17%) remain persistently higher than urban poverty rates (~12%).

And in a high-wage urban area (e.g., Seattle), a $20,000 Social Security check is a tiny fraction of the local per capita income. In a rural area, that same $20k check represents a much larger slice of the total economic pie. This makes the reliance on government cash appear massive -- ~29% rural and ~17% urban -- even if the absolute dollar difference is more modest.

Also, metro areas receive MASSIVE amounts of federal contracting money (defense, science, universities, federal employees), whereas rural areas get virtually none.

Mostly this is caused by the "graying" of rural America and the persistent lack of high-wage employment in rural areas.

[bombcar]

Part of this is causal - if you're on what used to be called "fixed income" (read: social security) you migrate to places where your costs are lower; which is often rural areas.

Another part is that they're looking at total income over county-levels, which means that one Bill Gates or Elon Musk in your county will wipe out millions of people receiving "transfer payments".

> In contrast, many metropolitan hubs, affluent suburbs and exurbs, and high-income, high-productivity farming and mining communities remain minimally reliant on transfer income to power their local economies.

This may or may not be true; depends on the money flow, rich cities can have large swaths of poor people.