Comparison
Colorado vs Maine
They differ most on starting up — Colorado leads by 69 points. How many businesses get founded here, and what the state takes in tax.
No defensible weighting reverses this ordering
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 — Colorado ranks between 1 and 3 and Maine between 34 and 48. Colorado finishes above Maine in every one of those 20,000 weightings — not one reverses it — so on this pair the ordering is a result rather than an artefact of the equal weighting.
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
- 8920Starting up69 apart — Colorado 89, Maine 20
- 610Openness61 apart — Colorado 61, Maine 0
- 8954Prosperity35 apart — Colorado 89, Maine 54
- 4933Productive base16 apart — Colorado 49, Maine 33
- 7160Population health11 apart — Colorado 71, Maine 60
- 9284Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, Maine 84
- 6872Labour market4 apart — Colorado 68, Maine 72
- 4849Housing permits and prices1 apart — Colorado 48, Maine 49
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Maine
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
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.