I was thinking that too... And the desert SW for some reason.
It really is a tempest in a teapot. It's roughly a 4 point swing, with a mean of around 5%. Any given year, any state might see a one point swing either way, so let's say 4-6% is normal seepage.
And the gigantic population of metropolises pads the states that have them... As an example,
There may be more people on welfare in MT percentage wise, but there's probably more people on welfare in Chicago alone than there is population in the state of MT... That big of a disparity in population pools makes for some weird anomalies. Something like that is likely in these statistics...
Funny thing about data presentation. If the numbers won't make your point, try percentages.
If there are ten people in a room and five of them qualify, that's 50%
If there are a million and only 10% of them qualify, that's 100,000. You can hide the numbers with percentages, but saying there are "more" when there is just a higher percentage in misleading.
For instance, in West Virginia, in Dec. 2016, if you take OASDI (Old age, survivors, and disability) recipients' actual numbers, you find that they are 470,240 in number, less than 1% of the total of 60,907,307 recipients in the country for the same month
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/factsheets/cong_stats/2016/wv.pdf Of that total, 89,508 were disabled workers, who were .14% of the total recipients in the country, and of the 8,808,736 disabled workers nationwide, they represent only 1.02%
Considering there are 50 states, in real numbers, the other 49 are 98.98% of the beneficiaries, and I hardly think this puts West Virginia high on the radar.
By contrast, New York has 502,062 disabled workers in the same month (over 5 times as many)
source, and California had 682,668 disabled workers
source , again in the same month, 5 1/2 and 7 1/2 times as many recipients, respectively, as West Virginia.
Anyone who wants real numbers (assuming the Soc Sec folks know what they did) for Dec. 2016 can find them here
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/factsheets/cong_stats/2016/index.html, by state, by region, but oddly enough not just summarized in a table.
Someone was using derivative data
rates rather than actual numbers to make their point, but the point and the presentation are misleading, and make some regions look worse than others.
It also ignores the tremendous effort put forth by the Obama Administration to get folks in 'Coal Country' to sign up for Federal programs, from Welfare to SSDI, in a region which traditionally resisted being "on relief" because of the social stigma attached to not 'doing for your own'.
