Your Ethics Alarms Easiest Ethics Quiz of All Time is…
Do you detect any bias in the CNBC lists of the Best and Worst States to Live and Work in?
Here they are:
CNBC’s top 10 worst states to live and work for 2023 are…
- Texas
- Oklahoma
- Louisiana
- South Carolina and Alabama (tie)
- —
- Missouri
- Indiana
- Tennessee
- Arkansas
- Florida
CNBC’s top 10 best states to live and work for 2023 are…
- Vermont
- Maine
- New Jersey
- Minnesota
- Hawaii
- Oregon
- Washington
- Massachusetts and Colorado (tie)
- —
- Connecticut
One of the criteria for determining the best states to live and work in is is the extent to which they permit relatively unrestricted abortion, since many single women regard this as a priority. Ironically, such states are not desirable places for unwanted children to ever have a chance live or work, but this was not one of the criteria.
USA Today and other mainstream media outlets reported the CNBC woke propaganda effort uncritically without noting the obvious. The USA Today article began, “How does life in your state compare to the rest of America?”
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!
Ethics Alarms 
Try comparing the level of taxation between the two. taxation in NJ and MA is some of the highest in the country.
I will have you know, the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not the worst taxed state, in my opinion. Although Taxachusetts is making a comeback a bit. Current state income tax is 5%, and marginal income tax rate above $1 mil is 9% (this is a newly added thing, passed by voters last year!), and sales tax is 6.25%. If I lived in NJ, I would be taxed more. But if you have to live in northern New England, go to NH, no state income tax, except for capital gains, and no sales tax, and make sure you work there too! If you live in NH and work in MA, you will pay MA income tax, based on how much of the time you physically work in MA.
Greenies suck, so there is no way that state in a real survey could possibly have reached number 8.
Marijuana issues, failing liberties, abortion on demand, vegan bicyclists, totalitarianism from all sides when you have to drive to Denver to shop for necessities, etc…
They’ve got a good children’s hospital though.
Nope, Not a top 25 state.
I’m not biased…
I just realized that most people would not know that Wyoming natives tend to refer to Coloradans as “Greenies” based on their old license plate design. It’s not a term of endearment, but it has nothing to with AGCC or politics or anything like that.
Just as leftists see no contradiction in castigating voters for defeating policies they insist everyone agrees on, they apparently don’t question huge net migrations of people from what they rate as the best places to live and work towards the worst places.
Maine is beautiful, but its also one of the poorest states in the nation. How it can be both poor and a great place to live and work is a conundrum. Hawaii is the ultimate example of a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. It is racially stratified like no other state, completely dependent on tourism, expensive, and, as numerous residents told me on my last trip, incredibly boring unless you were under 30, a surfer, an artist, or rich. It also must have a majority of morons, because they elected Sen. Hiromo….
It’s simple: If you live in any of the top ten states, you will be surrounded by like-minded lefties. Which is the sine qua non of a happy life. The bottom ten states are filled with deplorables. Ick! Who’d want to live there?
The actual results are in and it’s easier than relying on the “experts” to determine their own weighted criteria.
The data shows based on where people are leaving and where people are going.
The CNN list is almost reversed.
If these are such awful places to live, why are their net migrations so high? 200,000 people net migrated to Florida. Coincidentally, 200,000 people net migrated out of California, where the cost of living is high, taxes are high, and zombies are roaming the major metro areas shitting on the street.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all politics, all the time – You couldn’t pay me to live in Alaska, regardless of how Republican they vote, but how little self awareness does it take to make something like this up? They didn’t even have put Cali on the list.
That’s what I find significant about the lists. They are pure propaganda, claiming to be information, but not even seriously pretending to be objective. Of course they realized they listed only “blue” states as good and only “red” states as bad. And their conclusion was, “Fuck ’em!” Objectivity is unwoke, sexist and racist, after all and all those fleeing the good states are as dumb as lemmings.
Humble Talent wrote, “You couldn’t pay me to live in Alaska, regardless of how Republican they vote…”
I wouldn’t want to live in a place like Barrow, Alaska or any of those northern Alaska towns either due to what would seem like a perpetual winter to me but some of the southern parts of Alaska are really nice and a sportsman paradise. Heck some places south of Glacier Bay have similar’ish climates to places in northern midwest states in the USA.
Why wouldn’t you want to live in Alaska?
Basically for all the reasons you gave: The weather is somewhere between OK and awful, it’s a sportsman’s paradise (and I’m not one), it’s very far away from everything, the largest community is something like 300,000 people… I’m sure I’m describing literal paradise for some people, just not me.
Got it and in many ways we agree on this one.
Thanks for the reply.
Amazingly, this appears not to be merely the usual propaganda by journalistic apparatchiks, but a kind of magical thinking that extends to the individual level. I’ve heard stories of California liberals who moved to, say, Utah, and they seem able to comfortably hold to the narratives they’ve been taught even as their own experience contradicts them. They’ll tell you how terrible Utah is, a bunch of Mormon zealots, ignorant racist hicks who want to kill gays, and enslave black people. But you see they had to leave California, even though California was doing everything right, because they needed a place they could afford, that was safe and clean, where the people were friendly, public schools functioned, etc. I’ve heard several stories like this.
And the next thing you know they’re turning Utah blue.
Just take a dump on their porch, they’ll feel right at home. /s
Yes that list is pure partisan political propaganda and it falls squarely within…
I like it. This is misinformation people need to know. As someone who has lived in a number of the ’10 worst’ states as well as 6 other states, I have to say that the ones in the top ’10 worst’ were my favorite. After going through COVID, I can definitively say that living in one of the ’10 worst’ states was much better than living elsewhere. That is why I want the list pushed. I don’t want people with the leftist social contagion to come to these last bastions of freedom in the world. They need to just stay in their fascist…sorry, corporatist paradises.
I’m sure you heard this one:
“You came here from there because you didn’t like it there, and now you want to change here to be like there. You are welcome here, only don’t try to make here like there. If you want to make here like there you shouldn’t have left there in the first place.”
I have no problem with people traveling in this country. It’s narrow-minded provincialism that got us things like the civil war. However, when you start taking the attitude that you need to change wherever you go to be like where you came from, that’s where I have a problem. Despite what Melinda Byerly tweeted, there is no obligation on the rest of the country to elect local political leadership that resembles that of San Francisco so that people like her who decided that high taxes and dangerous streets are not really their thing can move someplace and have it feel like a better version of home. If you want to live in a place where everyone thinks the same, then may I invite you to remain in your bubble and try to make the bubble livable.
Nah, no bias there!
But, as a native Tennessean I must agree that my state is a terrible place to move to, and no one should leave a liberal hellhole to move here. Memphis, Nashville and Chattanooga are essentially like East Berlin during the Cold War, neo-socialist (Democrat) paradises surrounded by deplorables. As a matter of fact, I think we’ve met our woke, blue-state immigration quota for the current year and there’s a waiting list for next year. We’re full up. Try Georgia, Alabama or Florida; they’re just down the road and might still let you in.
Seriously, I have a “Don’t California My Tennessee” bumper sticker on my truck. We mean it.
It’s already happened to Arizona. The home of Barry Goldwater. I can’t believe it.