These are the U.S. states most and least dependent on the federal government
Adriana Belmonte, Associate Editor April 16, 2019.
These are the U.S. states most and least dependent on the federal government.
States that voted Democrat in 2016 generally rely less on federal funding than Republican states, according to a study by WalletHub.
The analysis looked at the return on taxes paid to the federal government, the share of federal jobs, and federal funding as a share of state revenue.
Thirteen out of the top 15 states found to be most dependent on the federal government voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Ten out of the 15 least dependent states voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
New Mexico is the most dependent state on the federal government, according to WalletHub. (Graphic: David Foster/Yahoo Finance)
‘No ranking like this is ever going to be perfect’
“Obviously, no ranking like this is ever going to be perfect,” Stan Veuger, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told Yahoo Finance. “Some things you can definitely say, like where the states that have the highest per capita income or pay the most in taxes.”
But “it’s not really true across the board,” Veuger said. “Virginia is a blue state and obviously has a lot of federal contractors and a lot of federal money … It obviously relies heavily on what the federal government does.”
According to WalletHub’s analysis, Virginia receives the second-highest amount of federal contracts while ranking federal funding as a share of state revenue. And given that WalletHub weighted federal funding four times more than share of federal jobs, Virginia is one of the least-dependent states on the federal government.
‘Poor states receive more federal funding through Medicaid’
WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez explained that “federal funding as a percentage of state revenue was calculated as states’ intergovernmental revenue from the federal government divided by the states’ general revenue.”
Intergovernmental revenue includes funding for Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), child welfare services, and other low-income assistance programs. For TANF, Kentucky (3rd overall), Alaska (7th overall), and Delaware use the most federal dollars.
“Because the federal income tax is progressive,” Veuger said, “I think you can also generally say that poor states receive more federal funding through Medicaid, which is a huge part of states’ budgets.”
The electoral map after the 2016 election. Stripes indicate that the state flipped from 2012. (Source: The New York Times)
In the 2017 fiscal year, Montana, the eighth-most dependent state overall in WalletHub’s analysis, received the highest amount of federal dollars for Medicaid at 80%. It was followed closely by West Virginia (4th overall), Arkansas, Kentucky (3rd overall), New Mexico (1st overall), and Arizona (6th overall).
In terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, Massachusetts ranked first, followed by New York, Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. On the other end of the spectrum, Mississippi is the lowest, followed by Arkansas, West Virginia, Idaho, and Alabama.
Veuger noted that “all the poor states are red. Mississippi and Louisiana get a lot of Medicaid money.”
According to United Nations experts, the planet has until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change. CNN climate change correspondent Bill Weir joins Full Circle to discuss his travels all around the world looking at the causes of, and solutions to, climate change.
According to United Nations experts, the planet has until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change. CNN climate change correspondent Bill Weir joins Full Circle to discuss his travels all around the world looking at the causes of, and solutions to, climate change.
One player, four drafts: The remarkable tale of Dave Winfield’s draft history
By Jay Busbee April 22, 2019
Imagine what would happen if a guy like Dave Winfield — a phenomenal athlete drafted by four (!) different pro leagues — showed up in 2019.
Zion Williamson and Kyler Murray would be afterthoughts. NBA Twitter would establish churches in his honor. NFL draft tape-eaters would look for the slightest sign he wasn’t Serious About Football. Baseball fans would praise him as the game-saving messiah. Knicks, Mets and Giants fans would tear New York apart. Sports talk radio and daytime talk shows would fire off takes hot enough to be seen from orbit. It’d be glorious anarchy.
Dave Winfield isn’t walking through that door, even though he’d probably still get drafted if he did. He remains one of the few athletes in American sports history to get drafted by more than one pro league, and as Thursday’s NFL draft tipoff nears, it’s worth considering just how far we’ve come … and just what a remarkable cat Winfield was.
“It was a completely different world,” Winfield told Yahoo Sports recently. “[The draft] wasn’t a big business. There was not nearly as much media.”
Dave Winfield, pitcher-left fielder for Minnesota, before the College World Series in 1973. (AP)
A legend in the making
These days, Winfield would have been on three sports’ radars before he hit age 8. As a kid growing up in 1960’s Minnesota, there wasn’t even a radar for him to fly under. Standing 6-foot-6 even as a high schooler, he played four years at the University of Minnesota, leading the Golden Gophers to a Big Ten basketball championship and winning the College World Series MVP his senior year as a pitcher. His greatest challenge was keeping both sports’ coaches happy while he shuttled from court to field.
“Come from indoor baseball practice after two or three hours of hitting, throwing, running, sprint through the tunnel to the gym, get my ankles taped, then fun and games with [coach] Bill Musselman and his madmen in their weighted vests, fighting … for rebounds, and developing wrist strength chucking around super-heavy basketballs,” Winfield wrote in his 1988 autobiography “Winfield: A Player’s Life.” “But it’s worth it.”
The hype today around Winfield would have been thermonuclear, but back then he was still unknown enough — and the sporting world not yet progressive enough — that a scouting report noted, “This boy is colored.” Times do change.
Padres scout Cobby Saatzer pegged Winfield with a definitive draft-if available designation: “Have seen him hit balls a country mile,” Saatzer’s report read. “As a last resort I would put him on the mound, but he has too much power, and prefer him as a [sic] every day player. … Can play in the big leagues in a couple of years.”
Obviously, it’s worth noting that there were many more rounds of the draft back then, but there were also fewer teams, meaning the teams that were picking were casting some wide nets to see what they could land from an unproven pool of talent. Even so, check out this 1973 draft record:
Baseball: San Diego Padres, first round (fourth overall)
Winfield was one of only four players in history to be drafted in three different sports. Mickey McCarty, who played one year for the Chiefs in 1969; Noel Jenke, who played for several NFL teams in the early 1970’s; and Dave Logan, who played for the Browns in the 1980’s, were the others. While records for second-tier pro leagues are sketchy at best, it appears Winfield is the only player ever drafted by four different sports leagues.
Dave Winfield chose between three sports, and chose wisely. (AP)
MLB, NBA or NFL?
The NFL’s interest in Winfield was all but academic; he hadn’t played football since youth leagues. He grew up just a few miles from Metropolitan Stadium, the Vikings’ then-home, but had exactly zero interest in playing football.
“I was surprised at that, but they were looking at me for my athletic ability,” Winfield says. “The Vikings thought I could play tight end. I was six-foot-six, 230-232 pounds, I could run and I could catch.”
But did Winfield ever entertain the idea of football? “No,” he says without hesitation. “I didn’t want to get injured. I can honestly say I never thought about it … I have a lot of friends who played football, great players, and I can’t tell you how many told me they wished they’d kept playing baseball.”
(Asked why he hadn’t been drafted by the NHL for a clean sweep of the four major sports, Winfield laughs. “I played hockey as a kid! I knew how to skate!”)
Winfield devoted exactly one paragraph of his autobiography to his remarkable draft picture, a Wikipedia-esque rundown of who drafted him and at what position. (The book gets the NFL draft round wrong, calling it the 16th rather than the 17th.) No emotional connections, no sense of accomplishment — in this telling, at least, it was as unremarkable as anyone else getting a few decent job offers out of college.
“It was nice to have options,” Winfield says. “It came down to what I wanted to do for a living. And in my mind, since I was 12 years old, I’d wanted to be a pro baseball player.”
The other sports tried to lay claim on Winfield, but baseball was always his first love, and there was little doubt that he’d end up with a major-league team over a basketball one. This was 1973, not 2019, so Winfield’s choice didn’t exactly get Kyler Murray baseball-vs.-football breaking-news treatment. Besides that, Winfield didn’t exactly make a secret of the fact that he wanted to play baseball.
“I used basketball to negotiate,” Winfield says. “I would have played [basketball] if that’s the way it turned out, but it meant I never had to go to the minors.”
Saatzer countered that Winfield “hasn’t enough bargaining power in basketball to demand a larger bonus.” Winfield apparently had enough bargaining power to get himself vaulted straight onto the San Diego Padres roster without even a day in the minor leagues, one of only a few in major league history— and the only Hall of Famer in the last 50 years — with that distinction.
The Padres at the time were a zero-history, zero-pedigree team, an organization so scattered that Winfield had to paint his old black college cleats white, because San Diego didn’t have any size 13’s. Then-manager Don Zimmer wisely brought Winfield along slowly — again, a sharp distinction from the play-big-right-now mentality of today — and helped him build the foundation for a two-decade-long career.
Funny side note: At the same time Winfield was playing for the Padres, his old college coach, Bill Musselman, took over the reins of the San Diego Sails ABA team, and joked that Winfield should join the team. (The Sails could have used him; they lasted an AAF-style 11 games before folding.)
Dave Winfield, two-sport star?
Winfield dismissed the idea of becoming any sort of two-sport Bo/Deion-type athlete. “It took me four years before I could play the game [baseball] at the highest level. It was my fourth full season that I became an All-Star,” he says. “I would have had to step out [of baseball] and come back. I think you can step away from football and come back. But baseball, you have to stay in it.”
Once Winfield hit the ballpark, of course, he never looked back. He would go on to superstardom, becoming at one point the game’s highest-paid player (the Yankees gave him a 10-year, $23 million total deal, another sign of how times have changed). He played for half a dozen teams over the course of 20 years, winning a world championship in 1992 with Toronto, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2001 in his first year of eligibility.
The Dave Winfield of today wouldn’t just show up on draft day; no, we’d have spotted him a decade beforehand. But the only way that happens, Winfield says, is if kids can play more than one sport at a time.
“I tell parents this all the time: let kids play multiple sports,” Winfield says. “Kids don’t know what they’re skilled in until they play everything.”
And sometimes, if they’re like Dave Winfield, it turns out they’re skilled in everything.
Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
An earlier version of the article misidentified the Vikings’ prior stadium.
More from Yahoo Sports:
Dave Winfield opens old baseball cards
During a special LIVE taping of the Yahoo Sports MLB Podcast, Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield joins Mike Oz to look through packs of baseball cards from the 1980’s.
Aliza Sokolow’s Food Photos Could Change the Way You Think About Farmers
The L.A.-based photographer has trained her lens on the growers in your local farmers’ market, showcasing the art and beauty of their hard work.
By Bridget Shirvell, Farming, Local Eats April 19, 2019
Photo by Holly Liss; all other photos courtesy of Aliza Sokolow.
Scroll through the photos on your phone and chances are good that you’ll find at least one shot of food. And you’re not alone. Today, everything from how baristas decorate their lattes to the way restaurants plate their food is approached at least partly with an eye toward how it will look in a photo.
For Los Angeles-based photographer Aliza Sokolow, 33, food ’grams are about more than social status; they’re also a way to honor the people she admires most: farmers. A former food stylist who worked on Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and Recipe Rehab, Sokolow founded Poppyseed Agency, a social media and branding firm that works with food brands, restaurants, and chefs. Her photos show off produce: bright, carefully arranged citrus; sliced-open avocados; pints of blueberries from the farmers’ market—all showcased in a stunning line of prints and in her Instagram feed, where she also shares details about the people behind the food.
Photo by Holly Liss
“I really like to tell the stories of the farmers because they’re such heroes of mine,” Sokolow says. “They put in the manual labor and are able to tell when a tomato is ripe for the picking, something a machine is not capable of.” Her hope in capturing the work of her local farmers is to “give people a bit more knowledge and gratitude for what they’re eating and awareness as to how much went into what’s on the plate.”
The popularity of food photographs in social media feeds started off as a bit of joke, but as the influence of Instagram has grown, it has become one of the best ways to recommend and learn about restaurants. “Instagram feeds are the first place Millennials look when scoping out the food,” says Michelle Zaporojets, who runs social media marketing for several Boston-based restaurants. “Foodie influencers have so much power in driving traffic just from a single photo or Instagram Story.”
A self-trained photographer, Sokolow studied architecture and industrial engineering at UC Berkeley and graduated in 2009, at the height of the recession. Uncertain of what she wanted to do at a time when creative jobs were scarce, she took a job in television set design.
“The first day on set there were all these food stylists putting things together and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is like teeny tiny architecture. This is what I’m going to do when I grow up.’”
Sokolow started apprenticing and assisting on sets, and she eventually landed a job working as an assistant to food stylists on Food Revolution. It was while in that role that she took a tour of the Santa Monica farmers’ market with Chef Josiah Citrin of Melisse, and met Karen Beverlin, a “produce hunter” who introduced her to every farmer at the market.
Sokolow says all the coolest things she knows about have come from farmers, like hidden rose (or Pink Pearl) apples (which have pink flesh), orange watermelons, oca wood sorrel, which comes in 32 different varieties and colors.
Her a-ha moment came one day when she brought produce from Laura Ramirez of J.J.’s Lone Daughter Ranch. Ramirez is known for growing a variety of citrus, 12 different kinds of avocados, and other specialty fruit. Sokolow bought two of each type of avocado, went home, cut them all open and took a picture that she posted online. It quickly caught the attention of editors at Food & Wine, who asked if they could use it.
“I was like ‘Oh, maybe that is art,’” says Sokolow.
After getting burned out from working in television, she leveraged the relationships she made at the farmers’ market to launch her digital agency, and began running the social media accounts for restaurant groups and chefs, including Mindy Segal and Suzanne Goin.
In 2016, Sokolow began selling prints of the photographs featured in her Instagram feed and some of them have made their way to restaurants around the United States, including L.A.’s République and Moody Rooster. She has also donated prints for fundraisers, including one for Brigaid.
She uses the eye she developed through her architecture training to style the food in her photos. She’ll line up a row of colorful carrots, or place circular slices of candy-striped beets on top one another until they create a dizzying, colorful display, or cut open citrus to expose their inner geometry. Then she’ll share the photos with her 33,000 followers along with tidbits about the people who grew them in a way that is genuine, educational, and fun.
“By using color, she’s able to make something as simple as a single avocado looking visually beautiful and extremely appealing,” says Beverly Friedmann, a NYC-based content manager for consumer websites.
Aaron Choi of San Marcos-based Girl and Dug Farms says that while he’s can’t say for sure if Sokolow’s photographs of their produce has resulted in more sales, it has definitely attracted more Instagram followers for the farm.
“Her work has reached pockets of people who ordinarily wouldn’t browse a farm’s IG posts on their own,” Choi adds.
Sometimes she shoots directly at a farmers’ market, but most of the time Sokolow brings food home to photograph. It can take as long as a week to gather and shoot, as she travels from market to market across the city, seeking out particular items.
“The colors are what really excite me,” Sokolow says. “When you’re growing up, you think carrots are orange and watermelon is pink, but when I find a pink mushroom or I see that there are five different-colored carrots, that is so mind-blowing and exciting.”
After a food shoot, Sokolow cooks up the ingredients or shares them with friends. Her Instagram also features a number of snaps of cakes and other baked goods often topped with dehydrated fruits. She does a lot of dehydrating and drying, for instance, to make citrus chips that she displays on charcuterie boards.
“I’m really a snacker, so it works out very nicely,” Sokolow says.
Sokolow hopes to connect with even more people through her work. “I like to show the beauty that is what’s grown from the earth,” she says. “The farmers do the work. I just cut things open.”
We have a new earthquake data set thanks to the US NWS Pacific Tsunami Warning Center! This animation shows all recorded earthquakes from 1901 – 2000. You’ll notice that more earthquakes appear as monitoring improved with time. Watch until the end to see a composite frame of all the earthquakes at once!
We have a new earthquake dataset thanks to the US NWS Pacific Tsunami Warning Center! This animation shows all recorded earthquakes from 1901 – 2000. You'll notice that more earthquakes appear as monitoring improved with time. Watch until the end to see a composite frame of all the earthquakes at once! Read more here: https://sos.noaa.gov/datasets/earthquakes-of-the-20th-century/And watch a flat version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhmF-IwP6uM&feature=youtu.be
The Insect Apocalypse Is Coming: Here Are 5 Lessons We Must Learn
By Robert Walker, Truthout April 10, 2019
Scientists estimate that populations of ladybugs in the U.S. and Canada have declined by 14 percent between 1987 and 2006. Pixabay
In a new report, scientists warn of a precipitous drop in the world’s insect population. We need to pay close attention, as over time, this could be just as catastrophic to humans as it is to insects. Special attention must be paid to the principal drivers of this insect decline, because while climate change is adding to the problem, food production is a much larger contributor.
The report, released by researchers at the Universities of Sydney and Queensland and the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences, concluded that 40 percent of insect species are now threatened with extinction, and the world’s insect biomass is declining at 2.5 percent a year. In 50 years, the current biomass of insects could be cut in half. Such a sharp decline could trigger a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”
We have, it appears, a lot to learn to avert the looming insect apocalypse. Here are five critical lessons.
1. Small things tend to get overlooked.
While the volume of scientific research on the threat of species extinction is growing rapidly, most of the focus has been on the declining population of fish and large mammals. Compared to larger species, insect species and their populations get very little attention. In making their report, the authors conducted a comprehensive review and found 73 historical studies of insect decline. That’s a tiny fraction of the reports written about the population loss of larger species. Yet arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans) account for about half of the world’s animal biomass — 17 times more than humans.
2. Small things matter.
When it comes to endangered species, large mammals get all the headlines, but insects are essential to the underlying web of life on which larger creatures depend. About 60 percent of bird species rely upon insects as a primary food source, and birds consume up to 500 million tons of insects every year. Moreover, it is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of wild plants depend upon insects for pollination. And while some insects feed off domesticated crops, other insects help to keep pest populations under control. A 2006 study estimated that insects in the U.S. provided “ecosystem services” worth $57 billion a year. These include pest control, crop pollination and serving as a vital food source for fish and small wildlife.
3. Environmental degradation is accelerating.
Climate change, pollution and the ongoing destruction of forests, wetlands, reefs and other vital habitats are taking an ever-increasing toll on nature. And it’s not just insects; environmental degradation is accelerating and rapidly diminishing non-human populations, including birds, fish and large undomesticated mammals. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that wildlife populations, on average, have declined 60 percent since 1970. The International Union for Conservation of Nature now classifies 26,000 species as threatened with extinction, and leading scientists publicly warn that a “sixth mass extinction” has commenced.
4. It’s not just our greenhouse gas emissions …
No one should underestimate the impact that rising greenhouse gas emissions are having on the web of life, but the authors of the insect report indicate that the three largest drivers of insect depopulation are, in order of importance: 1) habitat loss attributable to agriculture and urbanization; 2) pollution, mainly caused by pesticides and fertilizers and; 3) the introduction of invasive species. Climate change, which many believe is the largest driver of ecological ruin, ranked only fourth as a driver of insect decline.
5. … It’s us.
The principal drivers of insect extinction have a common denominator. Simply put, the insect decline, in one form or another (including climate change), is attributable to humans. Our growing numbers and our appetites are driving insects to extinction. There is no letup in sight. World population, presently 7.6 billion, is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by mid-century, and the world’s middle class is expected to rise at an even faster rate. Our demand for food, and particularly our appetite for meat products, is leaving less room for other creatures, including insects.
Humans already use a land mass about the size of South America to produce crops for consumption and an area nearly the size of Africa to feed our livestock. Add in the pesticides and fertilizers that we depend upon to boost crop yields, and it’s no wonder that insect populations are suffering mightily.
The authors of the report on insect loss warned that, “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” Curbing our reliance on pesticides and fertilizers could reduce the loss of insects, but it’s our ever-growing need for higher crop yields that has given rise to their use in the first place. Given enough time and capital investments, the farmers of the world might be able to adopt sustainable farming practices without reducing crop yields, but we may not have the luxury of time.
To avoid insect apocalypse, we need to reduce the size of our agricultural footprint. That should begin by preventing runaway population growth and the unsustainable food demand that would go with it. We should increase our support for family planning programs that help to prevent unplanned pregnancies at home and abroad. At present, nearly 40 percent of the pregnancies in the world are unintended. We should also commit to reducing our meat consumption, particularly beef. Meat-based diets require the use of far more land and water and result in much bigger environmental impacts—from greenhouse gas emissions to land degradation—than plant-based diets do.
If insects head toward precipitous decline and extinction, humans can’t be far behind. We need to advance our thinking about insects, their importance and what can be done to save them.
Robert Walker is the president of the Population Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit educating the public about the environmental implications of population growth, and advocating for reproductive health and rights.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.
“He loved his family almost beyond belief. He was a man who carried himself with dignity, courage and compassion,” his fiancee said. “His last kind and generous act on this earth in giving so someone else might live is a true testament to who he was and how he should always be remembered. We will always love him.”
George Washington bust in The Karen Buchwald Wright Reading Room. Courtesy the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association
To hear Donald Trump tell it, he’s a fan of history, though we’re occasionally reminded that this may not be altogether true. Politico published this gem this morning:
President Donald Trump had some advice for George Washington.
During a guided tour of Mount Vernon last April with French president Emmanuel Macron, Trump learned that Washington was one of the major real-estate speculators of his era. So, he couldn’t understand why America’s first president didn’t name his historic Virginia compound or any of the other property he acquired after himself.
“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said, according to three sources briefed on the exchange. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”
Leave it to Donald Trump to visit Mt. Vernon and focus his attention on the limited reach of George Washington’s brand.
Of course, smart or not, Washington didn’t name his home after himself, though he appears to be remembered anyway. The nation’s capital city is named after him; there’s a state named after him; his face is on American currency; a prominent university is named after him (I went to GW); and there’s a giant obelisk in his honor near the White House.
Politico’s report added that Trump’s disinterest in Washington made it difficult for the tour guide – who later described the experience as “truly bizarre” – to “sustain Trump’s interest” for 45 minutes. The French president and his wife, meanwhile, “were far more knowledgeable about the history of the property than the president.”
Alas, this was not an isolated incident. Whatever strengths the Republican may bring to the presidency, knowledge of history isn’t among them.
It was, for example, just two weeks into his presidency when Trump declared, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”
Soon after, on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Trump tweeted out a fake quote from the 16th president.
Trump later butchered some basic details about Andrew Jackson, whose picture currently hangs in the Oval Office, and just last week, he reflected on the Civil War during remarks to the National Republican Congressional Committee:
“I said to somebody that’s been here a long time, you people would know better than anybody, some of you that have been here, ‘Has [partisan division] ever been this bad?’ And they said, ‘Well,’ they said, ‘Yes, it was.’ They said, ‘During the Clinton impeachment hearings it was worse.’ They said, ‘There was another time in the 1880’s when it was worse.’
“A couple of people were shot, you know. Even new people wouldn’t do that. And the Civil War, who could forget? I would say the Civil War was bad.
“And by the way, speaking of the Civil War, where is Doug Collins? You’re another warrior? Where’s Doug Collins? Where the hell is Doug? Man, he’s up there fighting….”
As the nation’s first amateur president, Trump has a strong incentive to take history even more seriously, since he needs some kind of guide. Unfortunately, he’s taken the opposite course.
New Mexico is the most dependent state on the federal government, according to WalletHub. (Graphic: David Foster/Yahoo Finance)
Dave Winfield, pitcher-left fielder for Minnesota, before the College World Series in 1973. (AP)
Dave Winfield chose between three sports, and chose wisely. (AP)
Photo by Holly Liss
Sokolow says all the coolest things she knows about have come from farmers, like hidden rose (or Pink Pearl) apples (which have pink flesh), orange watermelons, oca wood sorrel, which comes in 32 different varieties and colors.
“By using color, she’s able to make something as simple as a single avocado looking visually beautiful and extremely appealing,” says Beverly Friedmann, a NYC-based content manager for consumer websites.
