Comparison
Maryland vs Vermont
They differ most on starting up — Maryland leads by 23 points. How many businesses get founded here, and what the state takes in tax.
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 — Maryland ranks between 5 and 19 and Vermont between 4 and 28. Maryland is published ahead of Vermont at 8 against 8, but 7,004 of those 20,000 weightings — 35.0% — put Vermont 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
- 3310Starting up23 apart — Maryland 33, Vermont 10
- 6588Openness23 apart — Maryland 65, Vermont 88
- 7183Population health12 apart — Maryland 71, Vermont 83
- 7181Labour market10 apart — Maryland 71, Vermont 81
- 8677Prosperity9 apart — Maryland 86, Vermont 77
- 2718Housing permits and prices9 apart — Maryland 27, Vermont 18
- 10092Fiscal standing8 apart — Maryland 100, Vermont 92
- 3836Productive base2 apart — Maryland 38, Vermont 36
Tax structure
Maryland
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Vermont
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.