Irrelevant. They impact the state economies greatly and influential politicians fight to acquire and keep bases on their turf. The Pentagon has dozens of obsolete and little-needed bases that Congress will not allow them to close for very local political reasons.

Which variable was that? You can't just cherrypick an specific data point and say that this invalidates the rest of the data. it doesn't work that way.

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Like what? I see no error in their conclusion. The numbers do not lie. The government spending data is not evenly and randomly distributed among the states. Politics are involved which is the point of their conclusion.

Ignoring the scientifically useful data they also presented. You seem to have no problem with ignoring data that you dislike.

Not at all. Bell curves is endemic to sociology, in grading papers, and other social analysis where data is evenly distributed. But in scientific analysis, data is most often not randomly distributed. Moreover a bell curve assumes we have an equivalent number of people above and below average, and that there will be a very small number of people two standard deviations above and below the average (mean). There is nothing about the government spending data presented that fits a bell curve.

Research conducted in 2011 and 2012 by O’Boyle and Aguinis found that performance in 94 percent of these groups did not follow a bell curve distribution.

The Myth of the Bell Curve

The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud

Early sociologists were seeking proof of the orderliness of society. Relying on the justifiably great prestige of Laplace and Gauss as mathematicians, they took the bell curve as proof of the existence of order in the seemingly chaotic social world. Unfortunately, the early social scientists often had a poor understanding of the fact that the mathematical formulas of Gauss and Laplace were based on assumptions not often met in the empirical world.

The myth that social variables are normally distributed has been shown to be invalid by those methodologists who have taken the trouble to check it out. Its persistence in the folklore and procedures of social institutions is a reflection of institutionalized bias, not scientific rigor.​

Mathematics and statistics disagree with you.

Explain why it is not then. Bases are not randomly distributed. Nor are they placed for defense. Stateside bases are training bases for the most part and political pawns for state and national politicians because of the income derived from them, which is the whole point of the research. Make a case if you have one.

I just don't think it is logically sound. You didn't point out anything wrong with their methodology or challenge their sources. You suggest instead that use of multiple criteria to arrive at a conclusion is somehow improper and that averaging multiple curves is meaningless. I am baffled by this.

How can you draw any other conclusion from the numbers presented? Red states receive more federal dollars than blue states per capita as measured in four categories of federal income.

Who has presented any other variables that should be considered?

Irrelevant. All that matters is how the state votes its representatives, which is a matter of record. The political parties in control is part of the topic. Republican states, despite their rhetoric on reducing government spending, tend to be among the states receiving the greatest amounts of federal money.

I don't think they are inherently more dependent on government money but they certainly do not spurn it. Federal spending cuts will hurt them more than they will the red states.