Comparison
California vs Colorado
They differ most on starting up — Colorado leads by 60 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 — California ranks between 15 and 39 and Colorado between 1 and 3. Colorado finishes above California 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
- 2989Starting up60 apart — California 29, Colorado 89
- 1568Labour market53 apart — California 15, Colorado 68
- 1748Housing permits and prices31 apart — California 17, Colorado 48
- 8871Population health17 apart — California 88, Colorado 71
- 6449Productive base15 apart — California 64, Colorado 49
- 8492Fiscal standing8 apart — California 84, Colorado 92
- 8289Prosperity7 apart — California 82, Colorado 89
- 6361Openness2 apart — California 63, Colorado 61
Tax structure
California
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Colorado
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.