How does Minnesota rank
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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.
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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.
