Comparison
Florida vs Washington
They differ most on starting up — Florida leads by 70 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 — Florida ranks between 2 and 10 and Washington between 1 and 9. Washington is published ahead of Florida at 3 against 4, but 8,044 of those 20,000 weightings — 40.2% — put Florida 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
- 9525Starting up70 apart — Florida 95, Washington 25
- 3468Productive base34 apart — Florida 34, Washington 68
- 5885Prosperity27 apart — Florida 58, Washington 85
- 5941Housing permits and prices18 apart — Florida 59, Washington 41
- 7186Openness15 apart — Florida 71, Washington 86
- 4052Labour market12 apart — Florida 40, Washington 52
- 6975Population health6 apart — Florida 69, Washington 75
- 100100Fiscal standinglevel — Florida 100, Washington 100
Tax structure
Florida
No individual income tax
Corporate income tax levied
Washington
Individual income tax levied
No corporate income tax
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.