politics

The problem is employers take taxes directly out of paychecks and send directly to the federal government.

This seems the require a better descriptor. Extorting an election.

This is what’s happening. We all get riled up saying NY contributes more to the federal government than it receives so Trump needs NY more than it needs Trump. Which may be true, but the reality is that Trump is trying to dissuade voters.

That's not really how it works - there's no one big sack of cash that gets handed over by the state, individual businesses (and people) pay their taxes to the IRS directly, and then separately to the state tax agencies (obvs leaving out some of the draconian nuance here). States don't have a practical method of withholding taxes short of going to every business and demanding they stop paying the feds. While hypothetically possible at some point, it's not in the short term feasible.

Tbh one of my main takeaways from this presidency is that states send too much money to the federal gov and have to ask for it back. It feels like having more local control of how these dollars are spent would maybe even be bi partisan.

Aside from it not really working that way, that's what they want, they want states to start acting against the union. They are intentionally stressing the constitution and governmental system so they can then use that backlash as the justification to discard more of the constitution.

It's a bully teasing and poking and pulling your hair and being annoying until you finally swing at them, then they use that as the excuse to beat the shit out of you. It's aggression and hate and malice being implemented as political strategy.

Those teach how things are supposed to work, not what to do when things don't work as they should. I'm willing to wager no government willingly teaches people how to coerce it into working for them, but at least America definitely doesn't.

Most blue areas produce money, most red areas (excluding Texas I think) are leeches.

i think people are still expected to pay federal taxes. even if trump blocked funds.

There is still a system in place where states contribute their federal taxes before that revenue is used for whatever we have budgeted. A state doesn't take "their share" first, and states depend on federal funding for a lot of projects and services.

That said, a state with large surpluses can probably write policies to use their state taxes to pay for federal programs that people want to keep, but that's a snarled-up and anti-american system, the taxes are supposed to be used for the people, not be used like a cudgel to enforce political partisanship. There would be a lot of courts who would challenge this, which still might go in Trump's favor because of his corruption of the judicial branch, but that's a LOT of work and expense for something that isn't going to actually get the administration anything but ire from the citizens of one of the ~~country's~~ world's largest, most prominent cities.

Largely, this is as usual, a massive pile of bullshit meant to fit into a right-wing news site's headline ticker, because people largely don't read stories, they just read headlines and don't question it. This kind of rhetoric has always been about making his most powerful asset, his ludicrously stupid and armed and fanatical base feel like he's still big strong daddy choking everyone.

As somebody originally from New York State, I firmly believe that we could render the Federal government irrelevant simply through economic means alone

If Biden had an ounce of guts he would have started a shadow court with ethics rules and ignored the subprime court when it was clear they were off the rails.