Welfare State -- Washington's Republican counties depend on Western Washington's money. How can they survive the state budget cuts they demand?

When our state's rural Republicans toss around pejoratives like "socialism," "redistribution of wealth," and "welfare state," they're usually hurling them at the People's Republic of Seattle and the Democratic legislators we send to Olympia. As a commenter on the Spokane Spokesman-Review's website recently carped: "Eastern Washington... has always been shorted/slighted where state expenditures are concerned! Nearly to the point that we don't exist!"

That's not an uncommon complaint. Republican lawmakers make a similar accusation, albeit more veiled, that the state is serving as an engine of wealth redistribution. However, the money is not exactly moving in the direction most Eastern Washingtonians suspect.

Indeed, if Washington is a welfare state, it is residents in these mostly rural, mostly Eastern, mostly Republican counties who are the biggest beneficiaries, while taxpayers here in the blue parts of the state are left footing the bill. And while your typical liberal Seattleite might be neither surprised nor disturbed at this revelation, the degree of the gap between who benefits from state government and who pays for it may come as a bit of a shock.