Comparison
Virginia vs Vermont
They differ most on labour market — Vermont leads by 51 points. How tight the market is, and which way it moved last month.
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 — Virginia ranks between 6 and 18 and Vermont between 4 and 28. Virginia finishes above Vermont 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
- 3081Labour market51 apart — Virginia 30, Vermont 81
- 4718Housing permits and prices29 apart — Virginia 47, Vermont 18
- 3710Starting up27 apart — Virginia 37, Vermont 10
- 6383Population health20 apart — Virginia 63, Vermont 83
- 4636Productive base10 apart — Virginia 46, Vermont 36
- 10092Fiscal standing8 apart — Virginia 100, Vermont 92
- 8377Prosperity6 apart — Virginia 83, Vermont 77
- 8488Openness4 apart — Virginia 84, Vermont 88
Tax structure
Virginia
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.