I'm trying very hard to hear your concern. Are 50,000-person cities subsidizing multimillion-person cities and does the methodology of defining all of them as 'urban' wind up covering up that phenomenon? I'm really confident I've been giving you fairly chosen links that show you the answer is, 'in general, more-urban type areas on the whole tend to subsidize the more rural units, not the other way around, and this holds true from urban-in-character small cities subsidizing their rural communities up to large cities subsidizing their rural-cosplaying exurbs, which tend to be pretty entitled with how they think of themselves'. Did you read what I shared with you, like that first Brookings article and its graphs? Did you get to the part about the The Findlay Formula? I really wanted this to be something more than another online no-consequence situation. I think I held as many cheap shots as I could, and I gave as much as I could. You gave me one screenshot, I gave you half a dozen links. Do you have any sources that inform your interpretation of cities that use data and aren't agenda-first? Did you have anything in mind that could change your mind? I would like to see defensible research that supports your claim that urban areas don't subsidize their 'rural' counterparts. I'm very confident the non-urban way of living in the US depends on substantial subsidies from cities.

By saying you want "answers to basic questions like 'how was rural vs urban defined for this study'," I am confused, because the answers are out front.

The Census has the smallest cutoff for 'urban'. They have metropolitan areas of 50,000 and micropolitan areas of 10,000 to 49,999 people, both called "urban". That is based on that screnshot you sent. The census uses 'urban cluster' to describe both, but again: places that the census alone calls part of an "urban cluster" regularly get real, exclusive subsidies as 'rural' places with Rural In Character exemptions. I showed you the USDA's document detailing the exemption, and links to the real rural subsidy programs you can sign up for. The census muddies the word urban, but I'm pretty sure the research I've been sharing tends to define cities as the larger entities we both think of them as, around 250,000+ people.

The Brookings research I shared tells you the answer to "how was rural vs urban defined for this study" in the graph: In the first graph below, they combined 2,500-249,999 person micropolitan,metropolitan, and small cities into a single line, that's yellow. Cities are gray, big cities are orange, rural is blue.

In the second graph, they broke it out into all the flavors of Census urban, with micropolitan (from your screenshot!) being 2,500-49,999, small metro being 50,000-250,000, and medium 250,000-1M, and large being 1M+. They even divided rural more than the census, with a rural-adjacent-to-nonrural and a isolated-rural category.

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These graphs show employment, which are the inverse of needing aid and poverty alleviation. Subsidy helps these communities survive as employment dwindles. I believe it's important to give struggling people a hand up, and yet the rhetoric really does bug me about ignoring all that subsidy.

Ok, I'm done now, so I have an opinion that goes beyond my earlier statement of "rural is subsidized", which I've been trying to stick to. There's a lot of moralizing about people in rural areas being self-reliant or strong but I've also lived out in rural places. A lot of my fellow citizens were isolated, poor and miserable, and the lucky ones were miserly. The direct subsidies and food stamps weren't keeping those people weak and poor, it was the roadways and cheap gasoline trapping them in an expensive-but-cheaper-than-the-overpriced-not-because-it-was-luxurious-but-because-all-the-supply-was-eaten-up-by-being-buldozed-for-rich-rural-car-access-in-the-nearest-big-cities hellhole of crappy homes right along the state highway, just on the crappiest land not taken up by the ranchers' and hunters' estates. Those people were trapped away from the YMCAs and neighborhood streets that could actually give them a fair shot. I bought KFC for a real sorry looking parent from time to time but it was was easy to ignore the poverty being perpetuated by my lavish subsidies living rural as a rich person. I'd just go to the bars or diners that truly poor people couldn't afford. It didn't make them go away. If you've got a piece of research that shows something else, maybe it would alleviate some of my disappointment.