America's Talking - 50-State Report: GOP-Led States Are in Best Economic Condition

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

A new report ranks all 50 states from best to worst for economic conditions, showing which states have improved, and worsened, in creating an economic climate where businesses want to invest. The American Legislative Exchange Council released the state analysis, which ranks Utah as the number one state, North Carolina as second, and Arizona as third. Idaho and Oklahoma fill out the top five spots, ranking fourth and fifth, respectively. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to American Focus powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulib, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. We were recording this on Friday, April 14th. There was a new report released this week by the American Legislative Exchange Council. They do it every year. They call it rich states, core states. They take a deep dive into each state's economic conditions and rank them from one to 50 based on their economic outlook. Tell us what the report shows. Yeah, I love these reports that compare states. I think they're a lot of fun to see where does your state rank, where, you know, maybe where you grow up versus where you live now, are you thinking about moving?

You can see what is the economic climate, especially if you want to start a business or run a business in that state. And so they looked at 15 metrics and we can go through them, but the top marginal personal income tax rate. Okay. The same, but for corporate, personal income tax, progressivity, property tax, sales tax, and inheritance, tax. I guess I won't go through all them because they're a little bit repetitive at times, but it's significantly. It's based on tax policy and how much states tax their residents, but also businesses and business regulations, things like that. Yeah, so it's mostly taxes. And then there's a few others like, is it a right to work state? And how many public employees per 10,000 of the population?

I think that's interesting. You know, what is the kind of ongoing government burden to the people of the state that they have to support? So it looks at all these things, you know, weighs them. evenly and then says, okay, what are the best states? And so coming in in in number one, the best state is actually Utah. Utah, Dan. Number two is North Carolina, then Arizona, Idaho, Oklahoma. And I'll do the top 10. Six is Wyoming, then Indiana, North Dakota, Florida, and Nevada. So do you, you know, did you know, Dan, before seeing my story, did you know what the worst state would be? Because I'm going to do the worst. I could have probably selected three or four guesses, and of them, New York would have certainly been one of them, and that's the state that

did finish dead last. Right. Right. New York is last. I probably would have guessed California, which ranked 45th. Your home state of Illinois, though, is actually worse than California. Is that surprised you at 46? Illinois being there? No, I knew Illinois would have been one of the, if you asked me what was the worst state, I would have guessed New York, Illinois, or California. Gotcha. And then New Jersey is 47, Minnesota, 48, for not 49. The bottom 10, so Maryland's 41. A hundred Hawaii is 42, Oregon's 43, and Maine is 44. You notice any trends in these top 10 and bottom 10 thing? Yeah, it looks like a lot of red states are higher and are ranked higher and a lot of the blue states are ranked much lower. Yeah, it's definitely, definitely the case. I mean,

one thing that's not talked about us a lot is some of these blue states can get away with higher taxes a little bit because, you know, if all things were equal, people are going to want to live on the beach in California, right? Or people are going to, there's just always going to people who want to live in New York City or Chicago. So I think these blue states get a little comfortable and they say, you know, well, who's going to leave? I mean, we're California, right? Who's going to leave California? And so they keep hiking the taxes. But we've actually seen that Utah, for instance, has seen the largest population growth in the census over the last decade. And it's the number one state when it comes to taxes. So it does matter for where people

want to live, especially when you think in terms of decades and not years, there are people moving. I mean, I'm from Texas. And one thing that everyone back home in Texas talks about all the time is all the people moving from California. It is a regular topic of discussion. You've seen a lot of people in these red states who are afraid that when blue staters move in, they're going to raise the taxes. So it's definitely affecting how people make their decisions in where and when they want to open businesses. Right. Texas, by the way, ranks 13th. So certainly among the top 15 states for economic outlook. You mentioned Texas residents talking about California residents moving in. California is one of those states that lost significant population over the last couple years.

Illinois has lost population on net for nine consecutive years. So you got to think the taxing issues do affect where people want to live. Yeah, they have to. And when you also consider that how many illegal immigrants California gets. I mean, I guess I don't know they'd be counted in the census, but that's another factor in this is that, you know, what kind of benefits states have is where illegal immigrants want to go or just legal migrants where they want to live. How generous is the tax structure is, you know, if you're, are you going to move to a state where you're, you're going to move to a state where you're, you're going to like, you know, Taxitutes, that's what they call it, Massachusetts, where you're going to get tax to death, or you can just live in a Midwest state where it's a lot more affordable, of course, not Illinois among those. Now, this is all against the backdrop of increasingly perilous federal financial and economic situation, right? So we have real threats to the global supply chain that was begun by COVID, but then really worsened by the war in Ukraine. You know, like the global oil markets, gas prices are steadily rising right now. I just wrote a story. This

week. So the federal government is borrowing $6 billion per day this fiscal year, $6 billion. The federal debt is well on its way to be $50 trillion here pretty soon. We're over $30 trillion now. We've got the debt ceiling coming up. Federal Reserve really wants to keep raising interest rates to get inflation under control. Inflation is rising much more slowly, but we definitely haven't repaired and gotten back to where we need to be pre-Biden administration, pre-COVID. So we've got this elevated inflation, but the Fed can't really raise interest rates as much as they want because the banking system is so, after all those bank collapse, is so unstable. Now, they might just do it anyway, but it's putting the economy at real risk. Casey took a national approach to it. We also

have several state-based stories on which states, four states at the center square.com. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McCaleb. Thank you for listening, and please subscribe.