EDITED:

The question now arises, does political preference determine the financial category, or is it the other way round?

It is also interesting to note that those states who get more than they contribute outnumber the others by 64% to 36%. Of course, I have made no effort to further break down this data by population, or wealth, which no doubt play a role here. It also might be interesting to determine whether this ranking has been fairly stable through time, whether it has fluctuated wildly, or whether there has been some long term trend evident through history.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that this statistical display proves absolutely nothing, one way or the other. And like most numerical exercises of this sort, data and criteria are either selected ahead of time because they tend to prove some ideological position that the compiler subscribes to a priori, or, they have survived a complex statistical analysis that has systematically emphasized what the analyst wanted to prove, while other relations were conveniently discarded as irrelevant.

Statistics don't mean shit. You can always find a metric that will support your case, whatever it is.
Statistics can be a great tool to figure out what is going on, but it is worthless if the investigator is biased. People simply tend to interpret the data to reveal what they want to see.
It's not lying or fraud, we just can't trust ourselves to be objective. Its why scientific journals have referees. And even they sometimes can't be trusted, especially in the social sciences. Have you ever looked at an education journal?