Wait, were these CNBC or MSNBC Rankings?

July 16, 2021

Friends,

You may have seen in the news recently that CNBC ranked Virginia as the top state in which to do business.

If you’re like me, your eyebrows rose when you read it. My mind immediately went to all of the liberal priorities that Governor Northam and his allies in Richmond have pushed through since taking control in 2019.

Higher taxes, increased minimum wage, burdensome regulations, higher energy costs, California style green energy mandates, more liability for employers…the list goes on and on.

So how – in spite of all of these anti-business policies adopted over the past year – can we still be the best state to do business? Steve Haner, from the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy wondered the same thing. In a column he wrote this week, he pointed to other factors adding to his perplexity, including Virginia’s cost of living and the cost of doing business rankings, which clocked in at numbers 32 and 24 respectively. Virginia ranked a mediocre 19 in job growth. Our “Business Friendliness” score also dropped from the top three in 2019 to eleventh this year. Not great trends if we want to grow Virginia’s economy. Steve decided to take a deeper dive into Virginia’s #1 ranking and what he found was enlightening.

It seems that Virginia was saved by a brand-new ranking category introduced by CNBC’s into its calculation. It’s a category called “Life, Health and Inclusion.” I guess we should have expected something like this from the sister network to MSNBC. There had to be a way to reward states like Virginia for their embrace of the woke and liberal initiatives now so in vogue among the media and liberal elite. In an effort to explain this new category, CNBC says “we have expanded our measures of inclusiveness, looking more deeply at protections against discrimination, as well as at voting rights and current efforts to expand or restrict access to the polls, based on legislation enacted as of June 1, 2021” As Steve point out in his column, the data shows that the “preference of actual businesses seems significantly at odds with CNBC’s rankings.”

Maybe Steve can do us the further favor of letting us know where Virginia would rank using last year’s criteria. It will not provide any cause for celebration.

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Best,

Mark Obenshain