Texas no longer top 5 for business? New list offers latest version of blue-state fantasy | Opinion

Come closer: I want to tell you a little secret about the news business.

Anytime you see a batch of rankings or a top 10 list, it’s mostly subjective. And one of the prime factors is what will spark debate or controversy (and thus readership).

There’s nothing wrong with that. We like to debate how NFL quarterbacks rank, list our top hamburger joints and ponder the best Billy Joel album and why it’s definitely “52nd Street.” If we all agreed, it wouldn’t be any fun.

That brings us to CNBC’s annual ranking of the states’ business climates. This year’s big news is that — gasp — Texas is outside of the top 5 for the first time since the business network created the rankings in 2007. Texas fell all the way to … sixth, barely behind Minnesota. The cable business channel largely attributes the state’s decline to health, lifestyle and inclusion, ranking Texas dead last in that category.

CNBC’s evaluation is thorough, and it has a good reputation. But this has all the trappings of red state/blue state politics, Lone Star envy and propping up sagging mid-summer ratings and online readership.

Somehow, Texas leads the rankings in access to capital and is second among workforces and overall state economies. It’s in the top half, minimum, for every rating but lifestyle and education.

But there are five better states in which to do business? How? Sorry, you’ll have to speak up for me to hear you over the moving trucks whizzing by on I-35.

Other rankings have Texas remaining on top, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office noted, including 19 straight years as the best business state in a survey of CEOs. The Lone Star State is the undisputed champion of job creation and business relocation.

“Texas remains Number One because people and businesses are choosing our state over any other for the unmatched competitive advantages we offer: no corporate or personal income taxes, a predictable regulatory climate and a young, skilled, diverse and growing workforce,” said Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary.

It’s understandable that CNBC, which obviously devotes considerable resources to the rankings, needed a new storyline. Words like “still,” “again” or “unchanged” don’t make for great headlines. But as our states become ever more polarized, some are straining to argue that the economic boom in Republican-led states isn’t all that it seems.

The site Business Insider reported recently that Florida led the way in people moving out of the state. The finding is preposterous on its face — everything we know about population growth and U-Haul rentals has told us for years that people are pouring out of California and New York for Texas, Florida and Tennessee.

Sure enough, the story was exactly backwards and soon corrected, after Twitter sleuths suggested that the reporter misread a Census spreadsheet. There but for the grace of God goes any of us writing on deadline. But the fact that no one at Insider apparently questioned or double-checked an extremely unlikely finding suggests they desperately wanted it to be true.

CNBC built its explanation of Texas’ ranking on the idea that the state’s culture-war stances, including on transgender issues, was hurting its business climate. On the margins, that’s probably true. But some are attracted to the state’s conservatism, so it’s mostly a wash. Leftist states are just as extreme on some of the same issues and are taking steps that could drive families away. Look at California advancing a measure that would make a parent’s refusal to embrace a gender transition a factor in custody cases.

Where CNBC gets it right, sort of, is the long-term effects of decades of relentless growth. We need better access to healthcare and particularly more doctors of all kinds. Our housing market is getting too sparse and too expensive. It’s tough to keep up with infrastructure needs, and we’re all crossing our fingers on the power grid surviving this relentless summer. Our schools must do a much better job of educating our future workforce.

In other words, CNBC could have written that Texas has been so strong for so long that its problems are actually symptoms of its wild success. But then, that’s not much of a headline, is it?

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