Comparison
Colorado vs Maryland
They differ most on starting up — Colorado leads by 56 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 — Colorado ranks between 1 and 3 and Maryland between 5 and 19. Colorado finishes above Maryland 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
- 8933Starting up56 apart — Colorado 89, Maryland 33
- 4827Housing permits and prices21 apart — Colorado 48, Maryland 27
- 4938Productive base11 apart — Colorado 49, Maryland 38
- 92100Fiscal standing8 apart — Colorado 92, Maryland 100
- 6165Openness4 apart — Colorado 61, Maryland 65
- 6871Labour market3 apart — Colorado 68, Maryland 71
- 8986Prosperity3 apart — Colorado 89, Maryland 86
- 7171Population healthlevel — Colorado 71, Maryland 71
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Maryland
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.