These are America’s 10 worst states to live and work in for 2023 according to CNBC. All are red.
1. Texas
2. Oklahoma
3. Louisiana
4. South Carolina
5. Alabama
6. Missouri
7. Indiana
8. Tennessee
9. Arkansas
10. Floridahttps://t.co/3h0mDfZSyt— ??????????Tweety?????????? (@DarkBlue420) July 14, 2023
To be fair, I only know Indiana, Crossroads of America, as the ever-rerolling mile of scenery stretched between Detroit and Chicago. So I’m probably biased in assuming every Hoosier is an aspiring Mike Pence, but…
… Each year, as part of our overall assessment of state business climates, CNBC’s America’s Top States for Business study considers how welcoming each state is to workers and their families.
Life, Health and Inclusion is one of the study’s ten categories of competitiveness. And this year, with the nationwide worker shortage so severe, the category is taking on increased importance in our methodology.
We consider multiple quality of life factors, including crime rates, environmental quality, and health care. We also look at the quality and availability of childcare, which is one of the most important factors in getting parents back into the workforce.
Casting the widest possible net for workers means not turning anyone away. So we consider inclusiveness in state laws by measuring protections against discrimination, as well as voting rights. And with surveys showing a substantial percentage of women considering abortion restrictions when making a choice of where to live in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, reproductive rights are part of this year’s equation as well…
Only time I ever set foot in Texas was an excruciating layover at the George Bush International Airport, twenty-some years ago, and airports are never much respite even when they’re *not* undergoing major remodeling and/or in Texas…
The Houston Chronicle didn’t run to Cancun when the grid went down. You did. pic.twitter.com/iwPFn8Gc2z
— Carolyn Gonzalez (@CaylinSoo) July 17, 2023
No shockers on the Ten Best States list — Connecticut, Massachusetts / Colorado (tie), Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Jersey, Maine, and Vermont.
Thus, the neverending argument: Does living in a prosperous, pretty state make people less conservative? Or does being a liberal state make it more likely its denizens will be prosperous, especially if they have access to natural beauties?
RepubAnon
Oh, I’ll bet Florida can climb to challenge Texas for the #1 spot in 2023…
Scuffletuffle
Hahahaha!
pacem appellant
I wonder which criteria are keeping California out of the top ten best states. I think it’s great here! But the cost of living might be dragging our rating down.
bbleh
Unlike most other states in the “rust belt,” Indiana was settled primarily from the south.
Edmund dantes
I mean some of those best northern states exported a lot of their really shitty citizens and business owners (running away from those worker friendly regulations) to the South.
lol
bbleh
@pacem appellant: also CA very big, very diverse (in many respects), very complex. Note number of smaller states in the list, several of them fairly homogenous in many respects. Were CA more like a larger version of OR or WA, it mighta made it, but …
Martin
@pacem appellant: Housing and homelessness. CA also has a lot of poverty because we have a LOT of recent immigrants. A fair bit of that is related to housing.
Basically, we need to build a fuckton of housing and then see what happens. The state is trying. Cities are resisting.
pacem appellant
@Martin: True, true. Newsom had to become governor to force the city he used to be mayor of to build more housing. San Francisco is so parochial.
Anne Laurie
Well, yeah, that’s the explanation I usually got when I was living in Michigan. (Of course, there was also a considerable migration from the more problematic regions of The South to Michigan, but that didn’t happen until after the First World War, and for rather different economic reasons.)
John S.
No qualms with these lists. Moved from FL to WA last year, and the immediate improvement in quality of life is noticeable.
CaseyL
@bbleh: Neither Oregon nor Washington are all that homogenous, though the divisions are more centralized than California, with its odd pockets of red here and there.
Oregon is “blue” mostly because of Portland: much of the rest of the state is very right wing, and Eastern Oregon is Fucking Crazy Right Wing.
In Washington (my state), the geological/climate/political fault line is the Cascade Mountains: everything west is pretty liberal, particularly along the Puget Sound coast; everything east is very right wing.
(Eastern Washington Republicans went from conservative-but-not-crazy to OMG-Completely-Nuts in an astonishingly short amount of time after Trump won in 2016. I mean, they went down the rabbit hole like they’d been waiting for the chance to do so all their lives. It was mind blowing.)
VFX Lurker
The Texas Tribune published an article today about the wretched state of Texas healthcare.
Tearfully testifying against Texas’ abortion ban, three women describe medical care delayed
Dangerman
Been to or through 4 of them. Stayed a night in 1 or 2 of them. Stayed 2 or more nights in zero of them.
dc
The Houston Chronicle just reported on the CNBC ranking. They didn’t invent it.
bbleh
@CaseyL: right, OR and WA were why I said “several.” (I’d guess that, because their population concentrations are heavily in the west, when people move to those states, and take these surveys, that’s where they move to and what they’re reacting to.) But they’re still not as big or diverse (considering especially population distribution) as Cal. Note also NY didn’t make the list, and I would guess for at least some of the same reasons.
The one that jumped out at me was MN — it’s got big cities but it’s also got relatively heavily populated rural areas. But there are data out of MN that suggest that all the chewy progressive goodness isn’t confined to the cities.
Jackie
Many states are divided east vs west. My state, WA, is decidedly divided rural vs suburban. King County keeps us Blue. I’m amazed overall we’re in the Top 10.
SpaceUnit
No disrespect to our blogfather or any of the other fine folks on this blog that live in WV, but how the heck did that state not end up on the bottom ten list? People are fleeing that place in droves.
And before anyone flames me I was born there. My right wing kook of a brother lives there and even he’s begun itching to leave. I looked around when I was six and bolted for the Pennsylvania border on my tricycle.
Chetan Murthy
There’s that old joke: if I owned Hell and Texas, i’d live in Hell and rent Texas out.
mrmoshpotato
Oh Shithead Ted! Haven’t heard your Canadian bitchass in a while!
Gin & Tonic
Kevin Mitnick has died.
Honus
@SpaceUnit: I’m a West Virginia native (heading to Oglebay next week for the family reunion) and was wondering exactly the same thing.
Cameron
@RepubAnon: I believe Florida is already dead last – Texas has some awful shit, but it’s not commiting economic seppuku like Florida. The #1 ranking means (I think) “the best of the worst.”
Mike in NC
It was treasonous assholes from South Carolina who gave the order to fire on Fort Sumter.
Glidwrith
@pacem appellant: I looked at their overall survey. CA isn’t business friendly, according to them.
satby
The quality of life issues in a red state like Indiana (where I live now) vs a blue state like Illinois (where I lived for the first 54 years of my life) are subtle, but add up to significantly less well-being. Trouble is, most people don’t know better since they’ve lived here all their lives. Voting, property tax assessments, schools, roads, government services: all slightly harder to deal with and lower quality in a state that hasn’t appeared to teach critical thinking skills for at least 50 years. And it wears people down just getting through the day. There are times it’s very obvious that this state despises most of the citizens who live here.
Cameron
@Chetan Murthy: Phil Sheridan in 1866, after a jaunt through Texas. Of course, he could get away with it, since his side had come out on top.
Scout211
@pacem appellant:
California rating
F in cost of living
D+ in economy (I don’t get this one )
D in cost of doing business
SpaceUnit
@Honus:
I’m guessing that West Virginia just barely squeaked past Florida. To be fair, I’d take WV over FL in a heartbeat if I were forced to choose. I’m allergic to Florida.
jackmac
The only good thing about Indiana is leaving it.
Subsole
It seems to me the top 10s don’t throttle their cities. The bottom 10s are more or less openly at war with theirs.
Matt McIrvin
I was going to ask why people are streaming into the bad states from the good ones, but it’s more complicated than that: some of the states on the good list are growing pretty rapidly, particularly Washington and Colorado, and several on the bad list are not.
Let’s be more specific: Why are people still streaming in huge numbers into Texas and Florida? Is it just that lower taxes and cheaper real estate attract business in spite of everything?
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: I’ve noticed that Oregonians outside of Portland talk about Portland the way Republicans talk about California: they’ll tell you that Portland is not safe to even visit briefly, that it’s some kind of poisonous death zone.
opiejeanne
@CaseyL: I love the RW nuts running for state office yammering about those politicians in Olympia, and begging voters to send them to Olympia.
Wasn’t Loren Culp a fun candidate? /s
eclare
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t know for sure, but Ford is building a massive battery/EV plant about fifty miles north of Memphis. Good luck getting an educated workforce, but I am sure they got massive tax breaks and other deals on real estate, infrastructure, etc.
Subsole
@satby:
Yep.
I’ve held on here in TX for about 20 years now. Never really known anything else. Don’t expect I will ever leave.
But man, the Repukes that run this state are some of the most nakedly nihilistic misanthropes you’ll ever see. Like, our governor pretty nakedly and actively hates the living.
I don’t often use the word diabolical, because I am not a spiritual man. But a lot of these state level GOPers are flat out diabolical. I mean actively inimical to the very concept of living beings.
@Cameron: Also bear in mind Texas is huge, and fairly diverse. Our leadership (if you so choose to insult the concept of leadership) is every bit as narrow, piggish, hateful, and utterly sludge-brained as Florida’s. But we have a bit more resilience by virtue of scale.
It’s kind of like 2016. Britain and America took a horrible hit, with Trump and Brexit. But we were simply big enough to soak the damage and keep fighting back. England, sadly, was not.
opiejeanne
@Matt McIrvin: Same in WA. They seem to think Seattle is a smoking crater. My cousin in the least attractive part of Wyoming told me so and hoped my daughters were safe. This was last year.
Matt McIrvin
…I guess the full survey answers my question: some of the states that are worst on the list above are ranked among the best “for business” overall, including Texas and Florida. The “economy” and “life, health and inclusion” rankings are almost diametrically opposed, and it seems like “economy” may itself be heavily weighted by “the state doesn’t spend money”.
kindness
New Jersey rated higher than California? How does that happen?
Matt McIrvin
@opiejeanne: We vacationed in Seattle in the spring of last year. I did notice that the homelessness problem there was extremely visible, much more so than on the East Coast. Aside from that, it seemed like a great town and I didn’t feel particularly unsafe at any time.
SpaceUnit
@Matt McIrvin:
I read an article recently, I don’t recall exactly where, that suggested politics are increasingly becoming a factor in determining people’s decisions about relocating. It was mostly anecdotal, but I suspect it has some elements of truth.
I would never move to a red state.
Sister Golden Bear
@Scout211: Because the East Coast media can never resist the narrative that CA’s economy is about to implode. World’s fifth largest economy be damned.
Betsy
@opiejeanne: I went to a thing in Minnesota in 2021 and when I mentioned I flew thru Minneapolis, some RWNJ neighbors were like Oh My God. You went through MINNEAPOLIS!? I don’t have a television, so I had no idea why anyone would react that way, but then someone told me Fox News was endlessly playing lies about fires, bombs, crime, riots there. I had no idea from my trip experience of it being anything but a perfectly normal place (and my gosh, all I did was fly into that airport)
Manyakitty
@opiejeanne: I was at dinner with a group a few weeks ago and people were talking about how Seattle is literally a smoking pit because of “the antifa.” Once I finished laughing I showed them pictures of my friend and her son, living the tourist dream at all the classic spots. At least it shut them up.
Cameron
@Subsole: Agree – I have 4 siblings, all of whom live in TX. Only one of them has expressed an active dislike about being there, and I’m not sure how serious she is since she’s been there about 25 years.
Steve in the ATL
@Betsy: terrifying! I’m in Minneapolis now. Guess I should let my family know that I’m probably not going to make it back….
Betsy
My attempt to answer your question, Anne Laurie — it’s the political culture makes the prosperity.
Tolerance is good for business, good for hiring, good for making productive use of EVERYONE’s talents.
Fair open marketplaces that reward quality and efficiency will outcompete those where status gives unearned advantages to insiders and elites.
Education, of course, is the big value-add for productivity, skills, innovation, results.
Belief in empirical reality, and a correct understanding thereof, is essential to achieving results in any undertaking, including the making of widgets or the delivery of health care or inventing things in a lab.
Equal access to education and oppoetunity helps everyone, as you can’t expect your region to compete in a global marketplace if 50% of your population is hampered in opportunity because they are female (same for any other group that is held back disproportionately) (I’m quoting Hillary approximately)
Honor cultures based on theft of labor and an idle chevalier class are sometimes elegant, but never very productive, except at stealing the labor of the oppressed.
Openness to new ideas is a necessity for innovation and productivity. Conservatism is incompatible with innovation.
Finally, only tolerant progressive cultures create broad acces to those beautiful outdoor spaces and cultural amenities; splendid public parks and waterfront access are a hallmark of liberal cultures; cowboy cultures buy off the nicest places and the waterfronts into private hands and clubs/resorts and gated developments, and the working people are thereby barred from access to the nicest areas, in general.
So it’s the chicken. The chicken comes before the egg. Open societies are broadly prosperous ones. Closed, retrograde societies are only prosperous for a small handful.
And the beauty is there or not there regardless, but conservatism destroys nature and limits access to beauty to the elite whenever it can.
Subsole
@Cameron:
Yeah. What can I say? It’s home.
Now, I will say there is a whole galaxy of difference between living in one of the cities, and living out in the sticks. I’ve done both, and I absolutely would not move back to the small towns.
jayne
I’m surprised at what they chose for Cons.
The air quality in MA isn’t worse than any other state in the country that has a population of more than 1000000 people and is fewer than 400 miles from Canada these days. However, the price of housing comparative to average income here has surpassed prohibitive and is quickly approaching untenable, even by this economy’s standards.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: Looking at their criteria — which is a bit less opaque but definitely not transparent — they judge Economy based on:
One of the metric Is annual GDP growth — where CA is probably penalized due to its size. If you’ve got the world fifth largest’s economy annual changes are likely to be smaller than other states with smaller economies and/or far less diverse economy.
Real estate market — yes CA’s housing market is horrendously expensive, with a regular boom/bust cycle. As far as commercial real estate, SF office space market has gotten hammered thanks to work-from-home, which then knock-on effects for other local business, e.g. restaurants serving office workers.
And there’s “Because a diverse economy is important in any environment, we consider the number of major corporations headquartered in each state.” I call bullshit on this one. Corporate HQ density varies for a variety of reasons and doesn’t necessarily corollate with diversity, e.g. NYC has a large number of financial corporate HQ due to the concentration of financial companies there. Plus companies have moved their HQs out of CA, e.g. to TX, so their CEOs can get their sweet, sweet tax savings, but the work is done here. [looking at you Telsa].
prostratedragon
@RepubAnon: New words needed for “Theme for The Jeffersons.” Moving on up!
redoubtagain
@bbleh: For this reason I refer to Indiana as “Mississippi with snow”.
dm
Even though it’s a Politico link, this article on the geography of gun violence is pretty interesting: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography-of-gun-violence-00092413
Basically, you’re far more likely to get shot in a rural red area (and die on the way to the hospital), than you are in an urban blue area.
RaflW
I moved from Texas to Minnesota in 1995. There were both push factors and pull factors.
TX/push: Hot. Freakin’ hot. And not nearly as bad back then as now. Guns. TX failson GW Bush signed concealed carry not that long before I bugged out (what a whipsaw to go from Ann Richards to Shrub. Bah!). And it was hard to find a decent job with benefits worth a shit.
MN/pull: Mild summers with long, languid evenings (twilight till nearly 10pm at its best in late June – early July). Decent jobs and reliable health care insurance. Arts & culture (and I’d come from Austin, which did also have arts & music). Democrats wining elections was a pull, frankly.
I’ve never regretted the move. The winters didn’t dissuade me, even though winter ’95-96 was one of the bad ones. It tests one’s mettle, but to this guy of scando descent, winter cold is always more deal-with-able than summer heat.
NotMax
@RaflW
First day (late August, 1970s) of two years in Minnesota the temp was 105° F. Several months later we celebrated if the temp rose to a balmy 5° F.
Geminid
@bbleh: I guess Indiana may have had more Southern immigrants in the first half of the 19th century than it’s neighbors. Abraham Lincoln’s family moved from Kentucky to southern Indiana when he was a boy. His grandfather had moved to Kentucky from a farm in the. Shenandoah Valley near Harrisonberg, Virginia.
Lincoln’s father Thomas made that trip in a wagon, but according to Carl Sandburg Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, walked barefoot from Virginia to Kentucky.
There were southerners in Ohio as well. Ulysses Grant’s family came from Pennsylvania, but many of the neighbors in his hometown of Georgetown were Southern transplants. Grant wrote that Georgetown’s citizens would have voted for Jeff Davis over Lincoln any day of the Civil War, except maybe the day after John Hunt Morgan and his Confederate raiders rode through.
I saw a map once in a history book, that delineated a large area north and south of the Ohio River and extending into Missouri. It was said to be socially and culturally distinct from the areas north and south, and included the southern halves of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. The authors called it “Butternut Country,” after the nut commonly used there to dye clothing during the pioneering days and after.
RaflW
@NotMax: The day I arrived in Minneapolis (July 15 +/- a couple days) it was several degrees hotter than Austin. Thankfully I had a couple extra days available on the Uhaul. Just padlocked it and slept on a friend’s couch where he had a window unit. Unpacked after a cool front.
The big difference: 3 days after arriving it was still 97 in Austin, but it was probably 77 in Mpls. And two months after arriving, it was probably still 90 in Austin, and glorious early autumn in MN.
LarryB
I grew up on the family farm in northern Indiana…my youngest brother and sister are still there. Strong union family in a sea of red. I left for college 45 years ago and never moved back. To understand Indiana you need a long view of its history. Strongly Union in the Civil War, then a lot of Southern white migration (Kentucky’s next door). Very conservative politically and resistant to the influx of African Americans into the auto industry. In the 20’s the state government was virtually run by the KKK…the largest Klan membership of any state. Voted against FDR in ’40 and ’44. Solid R presidential except for LBJ against Goldwater and the first Obama election. It’s been FOX News and Rush territory since the beginning…and the D’s are isolated in urban areas that aren’t big enough to make a difference. The perceived “horrors” of Chicago continually feed the irrational Hoosier fears fanned by a corporate and agricultural legislature. Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy made a difference, but this state’s lost until an even greater effort is made and some of the older voters pass on.
gene108
@eclare:
People will move to where the jobs are.
Also, no unions in Tennessee. Lower pay rates for labor.
Memphis isn’t a rural backwater. I’m sure its suburbs have good middle class towns, where the doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. live. They can make a quick jaunt to into Memphis for activities.
mapaghimagsik
@Subsole:
Anecdata, but the Brits I know seem to be unhappy and disappointed in how things are going, but not enough to actually vote the party in charge out.
One guy is definitely a “I did my own research” guy and convince Britian was the “kindest empire of them all” (China would beg to differ)
When I think Jingoism, I think the US has some lessons to learn across the pond, but I hope we don’t.
Kent
Born and raised 5th generation Oregonian although we now live just across the border in Washington.
Thing to understand about Oregon is that it is one major city, two college towns, and a resort town (Bend) that is completely surrounded by Arkansas or Kentucky. In fact, the Oregon cities were mostly settled by New Englanders and Nordic immigrants while the rural areas and especially southern half of the state were settled by backwoods confederate Scotts Irish types who mostly fled Appalachia and the southern states after the Civil War and brought their customs and politics with them
If Portland were more the size of Boise then Oregon would be nearly as damn red as Idaho.
eclare
@gene108:
It is a blue oasis in a red desert. My CD voted for Biden overwhelmingly, but I once got lost not that far out in the county, and wow, the more rural areas were completely foreign to me. TFG signs everywhere.
And yes, no unions here of course.
cain
@Matt McIrvin: They should shut the fuck up, us portlanders are helping them with our taxes.
They act like it’s some war zone but those small towns all have crime and a lot of drug abuse as well.
NotMax
Cultural whiplash, anyone?
cain
@Matt McIrvin: you should see Portland.
It’s very jarring to see tents all along sidewalks and so on. I mean, I’m used to seeing that in the sidewalks of Bombay or other cities in India. I would never thought in a million years that I would see such a thing in the U.S. Yet here we are.
I blame W. Bush.
HumboldtBlue
@Geminid:
That is also the general term used for the color of the Confederate army’s uniform.
Shalimar
The coast and also Hattiesburg are nice areas, but I have no clue why the rest of Mississippi isn’t number one on that list.
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Golden Bear: The state budget metric probably also means they’re ranking states with shitty social services high for not spending money.
AM in NC
@Betsy: Very well-thought-out comment. Thank you.
RevRick
@bbleh: Precisely! Like Southern Ohio and Southern Illinois it had a huge settlement of “Butternuts” moving westward from Virginia. This was reinforced by an influx from Appalachia during the industrialization era.
Stevo60
Indiana here. Yeah, it’s boring and pretty much sucks if you are anywhere but Indy or Bloomington. The state DID reject Pence when he ran for a second term. The only reason he accepted the Trump VP spot is because he was running 17 points behind a no-name Democrat in his re-election bid. Indiana DID choose Obama over McCain, FWIW. Then went all in on Trump in 16 and 20. Sigh.
Stevo60
@LarryB: Good post. Born and raised in Lake County and I couldn’t agree more. People in Central and Southern Indiana would sooner travel to Somalia than Chicago. I go there once a month to see family and buy legal weed.
Paul in KY
@Subsole: My wife is sorta from Texas (lived in Fort Worth for about 4 or 5 years before she met me) and wants to go back or somewhere South and warm.
The Fort Worth/Dallas area is certainly booming (IMO). Only other big town I have been in down there is Austin (which I really liked). Drove across Waco at a high rate of speed.
I would like her to check out Arizona or Georgia.
Paul in KY
@Shalimar: Someone in another thread said it was like debating the best composers and not mentioning Mozart, cause if you mention him there is no debate. So they just left MS out.
RevRick
In some respects, the quality of life issues reflected in the rankings shows the stickiness of culture. Four of the top ten are New England states, and the influence of their westward migration lingers, though much diminished, in places like Minnesota and Washington. The Puritans believed in education and community and quickly became frenemies with the Dutch colony of New Netherlands (which originally encompassed New Jersey), sharing a common Calvinist identity.
In the early days of the Republic, New England was the industrial powerhouse of the United States, and up through the Civil War often produced the most patented technology per capita.
Meanwhile, the South was based on the “anything for a dollar” model, which made it ready soil for slavery. Its economy along with its cultural attitudes provided no incentive for public education, nor any other sort of social development.
Basically, it’s take-care-of-each-other versus I-got-mine.
Kayla Rudbek
@bbleh: The University of Minnesota has an agricultural school that probably educates a good amount of the Minnesota farmers, and that campus is in St. Paul. So you bring the farmer kids into the big city for four years, versus Wisconsin where there’s a lot of state college campuses in smaller towns.
Citizen Alan
@VFX Lurker: I. Thank. GOD! that I was never offered any of the jobs I applied for in Texas or Florida.
Citizen Alan
@Shalimar: Oxford is pretty nice. You find a lot of college folk who fancy themselves socialists. And there’s a Beard Award winning restaurantuer who ones 5 restaurants that would be successful in any major city. So it punches above it’s weight in terms of social environment.