The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) recently released its annual “Rich States, Poor States” report. This report is based on analysis of all 50 states on 15 policy variables, leading to ALEC’s “Economic Outlook Ranking” for all 50 states.
We include ALEC’s Economic Outlook Rankings in our State Data Lab facility, and just updated it with ALEC’s latest data. You can use State Data Lab to explore some interesting relationships those rankings have with outcomes of interest. You can also track if states are improving or not, according to ALEC.
ALEC’s Economic Outlook Rankings are forward-looking, by definition, but states with better economic outlook rankings do tend to be growing faster in recent years.
We also see a strong relationship between ALEC’s Economic Outlook Ranking and Truth in Accounting’s “Taxpayer Burden,” our bottom-line measure of state financial conditions. States with higher economic outlooks, according to ALEC, tend to have governments with much better financial conditions.
You can see ALEC’s latest “Rich States, Poor States” report here.
Below is chart built with data from our State Data Lab website. It puts the 50 states in five buckets, after ranking them on our “Taxpayer Burden.” It then reports the average ALEC Economic Outlook Ranking for those five buckets. States with high Taxpayer Burdens also have much lower Economic Outlook rankings (note those rankings are from 1 to 50, best to worst).