Comparison
Utah vs Washington
They differ most on starting up — Utah leads by 45 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 — Utah ranks between 2 and 4 and Washington between 1 and 9. Utah is published ahead of Washington at 2 against 3, but 7,150 of those 20,000 weightings — 35.8% — put Washington 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
- 7025Starting up45 apart — Utah 70, Washington 25
- 5785Prosperity28 apart — Utah 57, Washington 85
- 5741Housing permits and prices16 apart — Utah 57, Washington 41
- 5868Productive base10 apart — Utah 58, Washington 68
- 6875Population health7 apart — Utah 68, Washington 75
- 7986Openness7 apart — Utah 79, Washington 86
- 5352Labour market1 apart — Utah 53, Washington 52
- 100100Fiscal standinglevel — Utah 100, Washington 100
Tax structure
Utah
Individual income tax levied
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.