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How does Minnesota rank

Posted at 10:45 AM on April 13, 2006 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)

With the Easter/Passover recess at hand, and with me having absolutely no interest in the exciting world of trunk highway bonding, I've been playing around this morning with a Web site called Statemaster.

One of the things that struck me when I first moved here many years ago is how obsessed Minnesotans are with how they rank. Or maybe it's a newsroom thing, but whenever there was a survey out that involved Minnesota compared to other states, it was an instant story, especially if it showed Minnesota superior to most other states. I guess that made us feel better about being Minnesotans, although I still can't figure out why we need to.

And then during the great budget cutting of a couple of years ago (when we couldn't afford to do anything like build stadiums for wealthy folks and provide health care to poor ones. Boy, those were the days, eh?) we pretty much constantly heard comparisions and justifications based on what other states were doing in the way of building stadiums and providing health care.

So I'm thinking this will be a big hit.

Here's some highlights of where we rank.

* Most murderous - #43
* Most taxed = #4 (no clue if this includes fees)
* Most trigger-happy - #44 (it's interesting to me that the bottom 4 states are from New England, where we were taught to just beat the crap out of people with our bare hands, of course.)
* Most penny pinching - #3
* Most educated = #6 (yeah, baby! I are #6! And the four states ahead of us are from New England.)
* Best place to live - #2 (So how can we be most taxed and the second-best place to live?
* Estimated # of illegal immigrants - #18
* Milk production - #6 (we couldn't even beat Pennsylvania)
* Sex ratio - #11 (Yeah, surprised me too, but it turned out not to be what I thought it was. It's ratio of men v. women)
* Attempts to quit smoking - #47 (look in the grass at any highway offramp and you know this is accurate.)
* Binge drinking = #3. (OK, explain this to me, Wisconsin, North Dakota and Minnesota, Iowa are 1-2-3-4. That tells me binge drinking is part of our cultural makeup here. I should find the "softball" ranking and figure out if there's a connection.)
* Growth in Medicaid spending - #45 (wouldn't have guessed that, would you?

I can see I'm not going to get any real work done today.

Comments (7)

I don't know about BINGE drinking, but i do know about drinking. Look at the top group. all cold weather states. Yep, all along the top tier of the country. And Wisconsin was settled by Germans & still full of them. and they brew a lot of beer. So don't be too surprised. what else can you do in January up here? Oh. Well, I do have 5 kids born in October.

Posted by Trisha | April 13, 2006 12:17 PM

Beer in the winter, or so I've heard, isn't as good as beer in the summer. But this is a good example of the conflicting data. How can you be the 2nd most educated, and also a top state when it comes to binge drinking.

OK, there's the fat pitch. Hit it.

Posted by Bob Collins | April 13, 2006 1:20 PM

This is a very cool resource. I'm surprised it took the internet so long for something like this to develop.

This site is managed by a local too, if anyone picked up the St. Coud Times today.

Posted by Don | April 13, 2006 2:04 PM

Man....one could get really partisan about the question you mention in the original post regarding high taxes AND high standard of living........But how snarky would it have to be to have an impact?

Posted by MN Campaign Report | April 13, 2006 2:15 PM

"managed by a local."

Ahh, the requisite "one of us" angle that has given Judy Garland and Bob Dylan (two people who couldn't wait to get out of Minnesota) "hometown hero" status.

Posted by Bob Collins | April 13, 2006 3:57 PM

MCR, I think it's an intersting question and we were talking about this yesterday when going over some numbers trying to figure out what questions we could put on upcoming campaign polls.

One of them is "why are you here?" You know, we don't really have a clue because nobody ever asks it. For the anti-tax crowd, it's got to be something that overrides the high taxes. For the our-schools-are-broke-so-give-us-more-money crowd, it's got to be something that goes beyond the education system.

I think it's a question in politics, actually, that we don't ask near enough ... not only of the politicians, but of ourselves.

Why do we choose to live here? If we can agree on the reason(s), we actually have the foundation for bipartisanship toward preserving that.

Posted by Bob Collins | April 13, 2006 4:01 PM

I agree with you - my comment wasn't intended to be a dig at either party, but rather a view that these rankings could be manipulated in very partisan ways by either party.

Posted by MN Campaign Report | April 13, 2006 6:54 PM

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