When the NCGOP’s house publication Carolina Journal trumpeted the news that our state was ranked fifth in a new index of state economic competitiveness, I made a bet with myself that the report had come from ALEC. I won that bet. The American Legislative Exchange Council is a lowest-common-denominator corporate pressure group best known for authoring Florida’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” law. ALEC is a favorite source of template legislation for the NCGA, and in turn the NCGA is a favorite legislature of ALEC. That this group would laud our decade-old right-wing policy status quo is hardly remarkable.

Neither is it surprising that the report itself turns out to be bunk. To begin with, consider who authored this document: Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore, and a gentleman named Jonathan Williams. Of Williams I know little, but Laffer and Moore are well known as two of the far right’s preeminent economic hucksters. Laffer has been the economics profession’s laughingstock (or LAFF-ingstock, sorry) for over four decades since he invented the preposterous notion that tax cuts increase government revenue. Moore, for his part, is such a crank that not even a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate would confirm his appointment to the Federal Reserve Board. When these people talk, assume that what they have to say is likely to be nonsense.

And indeed it is. Proclaiming a report on “economic competitvenes,” Laffer et. al. instead evaluate states on the degree to which they have enacted ALEC’s reactionary agenda. Every “right-to-work” state, including dirt-poor Mississippi, gets ranked number one in the area of labor policy. “Average worker’s compensation costs” are ranked depending upon how little an injured worker receives when injured on the job, with the most callous states venerated as innovators. Tax policy? The lower the better. Minimum wage? Only $7.25 will do.

Clearly, this is an expression of theology, not policy analysis. The metrics on which ALEC judges each state flow from a policy agenda developed two generations ago and backed by some of the worst corporations in the country. Consider a more sensible ranking. On per capita income, left-wing Maryland leads the pack. (Mississippi is last.) On R&D expenditures, super-left-wing California is first, and COVID paradise South Dakota performs the worst. Almost all of the venture capital funding in the country resides in California, New York or Massachusetts. The politically progressive states are the economically progressive states.

I suspect that Carolina Journal and its core audience are so ensconced in the universe of alternative facts that ALEC seems the ultimate authority on competitiveness. Expect these “rankings” to circulate in Republican press releases in the coming days. But let’s be clear: they have no credibility. If the question is whether our legislature has remade the state into a Tea Party-MAGA paradise, the results have been a smashing success. On humanitarian grounds, they are disaster.