Is this really a "red state/blue state" issue? In theory, federal spending should be for projects the the individual states can not or will not fund.
A lot of federal spending is infrastructure related: highways, bridges, etc. If you're building/repaving, for example, I-90, the money spent in the individual states for their portion of the highway gets counted toward that state's share of the federal pie.
Does anybody honestly think South Dakota would fund it's portion of I-90 when the vast majority of traffic on -90 in interstate between Washington and the Wisconsin/Illinois/Indiana area?
Would Nevada fund it's portion of I-70? There is nothing east of Reno in Nevada that warrants a 4-lane highway. It only makes sense if you follow it east a long way outside the state.
Would the gulf coast states pay for port maintenance/upgrades knowing that most of the goods flowing through those ports are leaving the states as quickly as the trucks can be loaded(oh,. there's more internally useless highway funding,..)
How much less traffic would the west coast ports(San Diego, San Fransisco,Seattle/Tacoma) have if there were no infrastructure to trans-ship goods across the country?
Another large portion of federal spending is on military/defense. We never placed early warning radar in California just because there are a lot of tax payers there. We put it in Washington, Montana, North Dakota, and all over Canada(Gasp! They're not even in the US,.. why do we throw money up there?)
The fact that the federal government spends relatively more in states with lower populations kind of shows that the system is working the way it was intended.
If you have to get tied up int the whole "Red-vs-Blue" debate, here's some more
relevant and entertaining information.