Looks like 3 to me. Anyhow...
1) my intent in mentioning the shuttle disaster is to point out as per the original argument regarding Texas Secession was that since Texas is still part of the United States, the Federal Government immediately stepped in and invested money and resources to mitigate that disaster.
The federal resources were almost entirely investigative rather than mitigative. They were expended collecting and searching for debris to figure out what happened. Considering that it was the United States' shuttle and not exclusively Texas' shuttle, it is only rational that the United States government as a whole should bear the investigative expenses of collecting and interpreting the debris.
If Texas were not part of the United States (again as per the original secession debate), it is unlikely that the same scenario would have played out and the independant country of Texas would have had to foot the entire bill on it's own (at least at first).
If Texas were not part of the United States, it is unlikely that they would have found any significant interest or value in investigating the cause of the United States' shuttle to crash and therefore would have incurred very few expenses for it. It is also likely, presuming that the two nations were on friendly terms, that they would have simply allowed the United States government to send its people in and gather what they needed at their own expense, much as Britain would probably do if the incident had happened in their skies.
This all goes back to the initial inference I made that Texas has certain uncalculated benefits to being part of the United States that are not directly reflected in how much of their tax dollars they get back according to some chart. Is that so difficult to understand ?
Not at all, however you are being extremely presumptuous and vague as to what you classify as an uncalculated benefit. You are also neglecting other uncalculated costs incurred by Texas out of membership, among them having its laws prohibiting abortion and sodomy overturned against the state's will or popular desires.
2) Yes I brought up the surplus/deficit argument to begin with in response to the inane argument regarding Texas secession. The point was that Texas has and still recieves benefits nearly equal to or exceeding what they send to Washington in tax dollars.
All that you have been able to physically substantiate is a five cent on the dollar deficit. In a vague sense, that could be stretched into "nearly equal to" though in the interest of precision it is still a 5 cent deficit. It is certainly a stretch to conclude from that figure that Texas' benefits exceed what is lost without further data and, as your more recent arguments indicate, also entails value judgments as to what actually constitutes a benefit.
This doesn't even include intangibles like the incentives or programs available to Texas businesses that help them compete in national & international markets.
Nor does it include intangible detriments such as Texas laws on abortion and sodomy being overturned against their will, Texas policies being forced into compliance with undesired and unnecessary environmental regulations, and any number of other similar harms inflicted by the government. But seeing as intangibles are by their very nature subjective, you cannot with any ease establish a mathematical surplus/deficit relationship between them or attempt, as you do, to cite them as tilts upon an existing mathematically established deficit on the dollar.
If your sole indice for determining whether being part of the United States is that you get back exactly the same as you give, then we would certainly be better off without you. Where I come from, we call people like that "selfish".
Then why do you have such an objection to Texas seceding?
3) Finally I have to add this...you had to sink to the loud mouthed Yankee insult.
There is no wrong in accuracy and truthfulness. If yankees do not like that characterization, they should take responsibility for their own behavior and improve their much-despised image in the rest of the country. That, unfortunately, is something that the yankee culture has never learned to do dating back for some three centuries.
So that you are not totally misunderstood; how much tax is too much? 10%? 30%? 70%? 95%?
Does the government empower the people, or do the people empower the government?
Do the states owe the government, or does the government owe the states?
Where you come from, what do they call fair? 70-30? 50-50? What?
No need for insult. I'm not a yankee.
Besides, secession is all about slavery.
We don't have any slaves. As we all know; if the South had only freed their slaves first, yankees would not have had any problem with secession.
Or....not. My mistake.