Comparison
Kansas vs Montana
They differ most on productive base — Kansas leads by 47 points. Output per worker and how much of the job base is manufacturing.
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 — Kansas ranks between 24 and 39 and Montana between 20 and 42. Kansas is published ahead of Montana at 32 against 32, but 9,614 of those 20,000 weightings — 48.1% — put Montana 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
- 5811Productive base47 apart — Kansas 58, Montana 11
- 4270Starting up28 apart — Kansas 42, Montana 70
- 5477Labour market23 apart — Kansas 54, Montana 77
- 7555Housing permits and prices20 apart — Kansas 75, Montana 55
- 180Openness18 apart — Kansas 18, Montana 0
- 3046Population health16 apart — Kansas 30, Montana 46
- 8492Fiscal standing8 apart — Kansas 84, Montana 92
- 4653Prosperity7 apart — Kansas 46, Montana 53
Tax structure
Kansas
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Montana
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.