[freeandfreezing]

OK, that sounds like you think Alaska should rank higher than it does since there is too much emphasis in the ratings on the percentage of people employed by the government. I presume you don't think other states should emulate that, but that the measure unfairly downgrades Alaska due to its small population and unique circumstances.

All rankings suffer from trying to map a multidimensional set of characteristics into a single ordered list, it would be interesting to see how the Freepers would rate the states.

[Eric Blair 2084]

It would be interesting. That’s why I post it every year.

Studies can easily be bogus. Garbage in, garbage out. Like the one that found that Cuba’s healthcare system is better than the US.

[NVDave]

I wouldn’t rank any state east of the Mississippi in the top 10, that’s for certain.

What these dweebs from back east don’t realize is that the percentage of government employees in many western states is mostly out of our hands where we have large BLM, USFS, BIA, NPS, etc employee numbers.

We didn’t ask for Yellowstone to employ so many federal employees. We didn’t ask for all the BIA employees, or the US Forest Service employees. Nevada didn’t ask for all the military employees located within their borders, and so on.

These idiots think that we western states have some say in this. We don’t. None, zippo, nada. We just have to put up with it.