The annual “Rich States, Poor States” report is authored by Reagan-era, supply-side economist Dr Arthur Laffer. Based on a state’s level of taxation, regulation and indebtedness, mostly, states are then ranked on which are best for business.
Basically, less is better. Lower taxes, less regulation and little debt make a state more competitive for business development than states which are higher in those measures.
A second report by the US Census Bureau shows per student public education spending by state.
What’s interesting about both reports, one from an advocacy organization and the other from the gray walls of government, is their remarkable inverse relationship.
Utah is the number one “Rich” state and Vermont is the dead last “Poor” state. According to Laffer, Vermont would be the worst place in the nation to do business and New York second worst.
Meanwhile, New York was the number one state in education spending and Vermont was number four.
If you look more closely at the data, there’s an even stronger inverse relationship between the Laffer list and the Census list if you analyze state investment in education only. Laffer’s “Rich” states, with a few notable exceptions, put very little state money into public education, while the “Poor-est” states put a lot more.
Utah is at the very top and very bottom of both lists, while Vermont and New York are nearly so the other way. Mississippi is also a “Rich” state that funds little for public education.
In nearly every economic category, however, Vermont is much better off than Mississippi: unemployment rate, per capita income, home values, poverty rate, you name it. So who cares if one place is, on paper, a “richer” place to do business if the outcomes are so poor?
Now look deeper at just education spending and outcomes.
The states with the highest percentage of students attaining a bachelor’s degree are: Massachusetts (at 38.2 percent), Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, Virginia, Vermont (33.1 percent), New York, and New Hampshire.
The bottom ten are: Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana, Alabama, Nevada, Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia (where only 17.3 percent attain a bachelor’s degree). The US average is 27.9.
Again, this pretty closely tracks the inverse relationship between the Laffer states and the education states. It very much appears that you get what you pay for in taxes as far as educational attainment is concerned.
So there you have it, right? No.
Here’s the kicker. The list of low college attainment states versus high college states impeccably tracks the Red State-Blue State presidential election map. There’s simply no getting around it.
The low college states are those who voted for Mitt Romney and the high college states voted for Barrack Obama. Out of those 20 states at the top and bottom, there is exactly one outlier – Nevada.
We’ve become, it seems pretty clear, a segregated nation - but not in the usual connotation of that word. In modern America, we pick a state to live in that suits us politically, ideologically, and culturally.
