Hello, this is Hank, and this video is gonna be about politics, so if you don't want to hear about that -- American politics, actually. So, even if you're interested in politics but not American, you can go away now. But this video is mostly about something that I've been seeing and has been annoying me.

So, there's this video on The Daily Show. It was very funny. It was sort of a satire thing about if America was run like a business, which states would we chop because they don't give as much as they get from the federal treasury? And that's very funny.

And it's true. America shouldn't be run like a business, and it makes that point very well, because businesses are run for the benefit of a few shareholders and America is run for the benefit of Americans, but hopefully -- hopefully for the benefit of all Americans.

So, yes, that's true. But I'm not a big fan of sort of how this has been taken by some people sort of saying, "Well, like, red states, boo! Why do they all take more than they get even though they say they don't want as much government? They're all hypocrites!" And that's kind of a vast oversimplification of the situation, because there are several reasons why red states take more than they give in.

One -- the sort of most important one -- is that red states tend to be poorer, and so they pay less income tax because they don't get as much money in income, and so they pay less money in income tax. So, yes, they get the same amount of services and they pay less into -- And if we're thinking that we should pay -- We should, like, give people more services if they pay more in tax, then that would be a terrible, terrible way to run a country. And the same goes for states.

We shouldn't base how many services we provide to the people of a state on how much that state gives the federal treasury. Like, everyone agrees with that, and to try and, like, not recognize that that's part of this is sort of annoying to me.

Second, red states often give less because they are often -- Or get more because they are often larger with smaller populations, and it is harder to provide services for populations that are spread across a larger area. It's harder to provide schools. It's more expensive. It's not harder necessarily, but it's more expensive to provide schools, to provide Internet.

There are guaranteed services of the federal government, that are subsidized by the federal government, and it's harder to provide those guaranteed services. It's more expensive for populations that are spread out a lot. So, yes, they -- per person -- get more money from the federal government.

And the last reason why red states demographically tend to get more money than other states per capita from the federal government is because of The Great Compromise. If you remember this from school, during the founding of our great nation, we were like -- the less populous states were like, "We should base representation upon just being a state. Every state should get the same amount." And the more populous states -- "No, we should base it upon the population of the state."

And so there was argument, and it was maybe not going to -- It was maybe going to lead to us not being a country at all ever, and so we had the compromise where we have a House, where the representation is based on population, and a Senate, where the representation is based just on the state, just each state gets two.

And so forever, unless we remake America, the states with smaller populations are going to have more power per capita. States with smaller populations tend to be red states, and so they are going to get more out of the government because they are -- they have more representation per person.

And I don't think that that's a particularly good system. I don't think that it's good for Montana, where I live, to have the same number of Senators as California, where, you know, 50 million people or something ridiculous live. I don't know. How many people live in California?

But there's less than a million in Montana. We have the same number, and that just doesn't seem right to me. But, you know, it's how we built our country and it's how we sort of got around, you know, the possibility that this country wasn't gonna exist at all. So we have to deal with these things.

And so those are the reasons -- and there may be more -- why, yeah. But they big one to me is, like, yeah, we're not basing the amount that we -- the number of services we provide for people on the number of dollars that they give the government. And everyone agrees -- I hope! Certainly Democrats agree -- that we shouldn't be doing that.

So, yes, it is dumb to argue that America should be run like a business, but it is also dumb to argue that Republicans -- red states shouldn't get as much money because they're Republicans. They should get the same services as everyone else, regardless of their ideology and regardless of much money they give to the federal treasury.

Thank you. And that is all.