The annual survey gives more weight to a state’s ‘inclusiveness’ and abortion ‘rights’ than to its cost of living.
The annual survey gives more weight to a state’s ‘inclusiveness’ and abortion ‘rights’ than to its cost of living.
E very July for 16 years, the business-news channel CNBC has touted its annual ratings of “America’s Top States for Business.”
John O’Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, once famously observed that “any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right-wing will become left-wing over time.”
That appears to have happened to CNBC, whose system for ranking states has clearly leaned deeply into “wokeness.” Ostensibly, CNBC measures ten characteristics in giving grades to states. CNBC allots points to each state, measuring categories such as per capita crime rates, environmental quality, health care, worker protections, anti-discrimination laws, voting rights, and access to child care.
On many of the social questions, there is not anything like a national consensus in agreement with CNBC’s favored views. For example, 70 percent of all Americans — including majorities of minority groups — approve of requiring voter ID at the polls. But CNBC, in ranking a state’s business climate, would penalizes any state that had a law.
Of the ten issues graded by CNBC, the category of “life, health, and inclusion” is given more weight than “cost of doing business,” “business friendliness,” or “cost of living.”
The states that landed on the top ten worst states to live and work in for 2023 were:
Texas
Oklahoma
Louisiana
South Carolina and Alabama (tied)
Missouri
Indiana
Tennessee
Arkansas
Florida
Hold on. If a place is one of the “worst places to live,” wouldn’t we see people voting with their feet by moving out of those states? Over the past decade, however, a net of approximately 1.5 million Americans have moved to Texas. The only state that has had more net in-migration than Texas is Florida. Yet CNBC ranks Florida as the tenth-worst state to live in.
Florida lost points for approving election-integrity measures and concealed-carry gun laws, and for limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion schemes that many companies, according to CNBC, “consider an economic imperative.”
Texas is treated even more unfairly. CNBC accuses it of “hacking away at inclusiveness,” and the state fell out of the overall top five for the first time in the 16-year history of the CNBC measure. Why? Booming Texas came in dead last among all 50 states in CNBC’s “Life, Health & Inclusion Score,” scoring only 53 out of a possible 350 points, a full 22 points behind 49th-place Oklahoma.
I’m reminded of Yogi Berra’s famous line about restaurants: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
CNBC’s scattershot ratings would have more credibility if the survey’s authors frankly admitted they want states to have almost no restrictions on abortion, no curbs on “woke” school curriculum, and a look-the-other way stance on the illegal-immigration chaos at the border states.
Those are all-important issues, but they are not by any means the reasons that companies privately cite as driving their decisions to expand or relocate in red states.