And California and Minnesota surge ahead of the US. I know this sounds like a broken record, but the numbers are the numbers. And reader Patrick R. Sullivan suggests I move to Kansas (based on a Tax Foundation analysis). Here’s at least one reason why I don’t plan to. From today’s release of leading indices by the Philadelphia Fed, combined with last week’s release of coincident indices.

Figure 1: Log coincident indices for Minnesota (blue), Wisconsin (red), Kansas (green), California (teal), and US (black), and forecasted levels for March 2015, all seasonally adjusted, normalized to 2011M01=0. Numbers in [square brackets] are ALEC-Laffer rankings from Rich States, Poor States 2014.

Source: Philadelphia Fed leading indices,coincident indices, ALEC RSPS2014, and author’s calculations.

That is, Kansas manages to do even worse than Wisconsin(!!!) Note the inverse correlation between the ALEC-Laffer ranking and relative cumulative growth. That inverse correlation holds for the fifty states (discussed in this post).

Note the Tax Foundation has a less than stellar record with the data… (see also here). But then, it’s not surprising that data-challenged people tend to cite data-challenged sources.