Comparison
Florida vs Texas
They differ most on population health — Florida leads by 25 points. One comparable public-health read, asked the same way of every state.
This ordering turns on the weighting
The 8 pillars are averaged equally, which is declared rather than tuned. 20,000 other weightings were drawn and the whole table re-ranked under each; restricted to the ones a person could defend — every pillar between 6.25% and 25% of the total — Florida ranks between 2 and 10 and Texas between 2 and 13. Florida is published ahead of Texas at 4 against 5, but 8,124 of those 20,000 weightings — 40.6% — put Texas first. The ordering of these two is a property of the weighting as much as of the states. Read the pillars below instead: those are measured, and the weighting does not touch them.
875 of the 1,275 possible pairings of these 51 jurisdictions are reversed by some defensible weighting. Most comparisons a reader can build on this site do not have a defensible ordering, and the ones that do are worth more than the rank beside them.
Pillar by pillar, widest divergence first
- 6944Population health25 apart — Florida 69, Texas 44
- 3457Productive base23 apart — Florida 34, Texas 57
- 5981Housing permits and prices22 apart — Florida 59, Texas 81
- 9584Starting up11 apart — Florida 95, Texas 84
- 5848Prosperity10 apart — Florida 58, Texas 48
- 4037Labour market3 apart — Florida 40, Texas 37
- 100100Fiscal standinglevel — Florida 100, Texas 100
- 7171Opennesslevel — Florida 71, Texas 71
Tax structure
Florida
No individual income tax
Corporate income tax levied
Texas
No individual income tax
No corporate income tax
Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State Government Tax Collections. Where a state levies no such tax the survey records it, and so does this — the absence is a fact, not a gap.