quote:
Not having a deep water port, and not having an energy source would put you at a severe disadvantage. You would survive at the whim of more fortunate states

Between natural gas production, coal, nuclear, and hydro I think we'd be just fine on the energy front and since the Port of Mobile is consistently in the top 10 US ports for tonnage each year, I think that would work out fine too.

The real question as to how each state would be determined by what type of population shifts occurred. As others have pointed out, Alabama gets a lot of federal money per capita but just looking at numbers can be deceiving. A WSJ study looked at 2010 federal spending in the 10 states that get the most per capita and it points out some striking things.

Alabama seventh overall that year, was second for retirement and disability and seventh for procurement (mostly defense) but not even in the top half for grants.

Kentucky, on the other hand, was sixth overall but over half their spending ($7,000 of $13,198) went to direct payments to individuals - with Medicare making up over half of that number.

I think it would be a pretty safe assumption that absent federal money and laws, the southern states would rapidly scale back if not flat out eliminate a lot of the social safety net, meaning that a lot of those folks in Kentucky might be tempted to relocate somewhere that still provided them. The people they lost would then be a drain on the recipient state.

Alabama's problem would be the other end of the spectrum. Without those defense industry jobs, we'd be fighting to retain a very productive segment of the population.

The variations between Alabama and Kentucky's situations would be repeated all across the country.

That's a lot of typing to say it would be a bigassed mess and take a very long time to determine 'winners' vs 'losers'.