Comparison
Colorado vs Idaho
They differ most on prosperity — Colorado leads by 66 points. What the average person in the state actually earns.
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 Idaho between 32 and 44. Colorado finishes above Idaho 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
- 8923Prosperity66 apart — Colorado 89, Idaho 23
- 610Openness61 apart — Colorado 61, Idaho 0
- 8956Starting up33 apart — Colorado 89, Idaho 56
- 4928Productive base21 apart — Colorado 49, Idaho 28
- 7151Population health20 apart — Colorado 71, Idaho 51
- 4861Housing permits and prices13 apart — Colorado 48, Idaho 61
- 6867Labour market1 apart — Colorado 68, Idaho 67
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Colorado 92, Idaho 92
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Idaho
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.