Comparison
Colorado vs Illinois
They differ most on starting up — Colorado leads by 59 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 Illinois between 19 and 39. Colorado finishes above Illinois 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
- 8930Starting up59 apart — Colorado 89, Illinois 30
- 9252Fiscal standing40 apart — Colorado 92, Illinois 52
- 4976Productive base27 apart — Colorado 49, Illinois 76
- 6847Labour market21 apart — Colorado 68, Illinois 47
- 7155Population health16 apart — Colorado 71, Illinois 55
- 8973Prosperity16 apart — Colorado 89, Illinois 73
- 4837Housing permits and prices11 apart — Colorado 48, Illinois 37
- 6157Openness4 apart — Colorado 61, Illinois 57
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Illinois
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.