How Defense And Other Federal Spending In NH Stacks Up To The Rest Of The Country

Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

In many states, defense spending outweighs other federal funds. Find out how New Hampshire stacks up after the jump.

Yesterday, we showed you a cool infographic created by a team of reporters at Stateline detailing, state-by-state, how a European recession could affect the US export economy.  Although New Hampshire wasn’t among the “highest risk” states, it ranked as “high risk.”  (You can check out that post here.)

And it seems that the folks at Stateline have been on a roll.  Another state-by-state graphic has caught our eye, and we just had to share it.

When the failure of the congressional “Super Committee” was originally announced just before Thanksgiving, we linked to a series of stories questioning how, if at all, mandatory defense cuts could affect installations like the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.  The people at Stateline have taken that concept further, comparing how much defense money states get (by way of salaries, procurement, etc.) versus how much other federal money they rake in.  They then broke that money down by the percentage of each state’s GDP.

In many states, defense spending is well ahead of other federal spending.  For its part, New Hampshire appears to be on the relative low end of the federal funding scale, with roughly five percent of GDP accounted for by federal spending.  And, like most states, the bulk of that money is related to defense.  To put that figure into perspective, as we posted yesterday, about 1.9 percent of the state’s GDP is represented by European exports.

Carla Uriona, Sarah Emmons, and Liz Gross / Stateline