Maps That Shouldn't Surprise Me

Correction time! Yesterday I wrote a rather dumb post about how a ProPublica map seemed to suggest, bizarrely, that New York state had received a whopping one-third of our committed stimulus cash. That would have been truly remarkable and insidious indeed, but as it turns out, it was a map of TARP funds for banks. And as you may have heard, New York has some of those. Let's all take a look at this map again.

Far from insidious, this is pretty much the definition of unsurprising. New York has the financial district. North Carolina has Bank of America. Virginia has Freddie Mac. Also Matt Yglesias makes a really good point that it's sort of bizarre to say that lending bailout money to a multinational bank based in New York City is the same as bailout money going, somehow, to New York.