Standing out, not outstanding

AN INDEPENDENT HEART: Rhode Island is the home of the Independent Man, but it is also an outlier in many national surveys, and not in a good way. / PBN FILE PHOTO/?STEPHANIE ?ALVAREZ EWENS
AN INDEPENDENT HEART: Rhode Island is the home of the Independent Man, but it is also an outlier in many national surveys, and not in a good way. / PBN FILE PHOTO/?STEPHANIE ?ALVAREZ EWENS

Since the beginning of 2015, PBN.com has run 18 stories based on surveys produced by WalletHub, which describes itself as “a one-stop destination for all the tools and information consumers and small-business owners need to make better financial decisions and save money.”

As consistent readers of the digital side of PBN know, Rhode Island does not come out well in nearly all of these rankings among the 50 states, metro areas or large cities. The lists compared the financial literacy of the studied populations, motor vehicle taxes, cities in which to start a business (to name a few that we didn’t do so well on). Others that showed off the Ocean State and its constituent parts in a more flattering light concerned the environment for working mothers, eco-friendliness and budget habits of the region’s inhabitants. Just type in “wallethub” in our website’s search bar at pbn.com/search.html, and you can read all of the stories in one place.

Overall it is not a pretty picture.

On Friday, May 8, the Providence-Warwick metropolitan area was ranked the 12th worst among the 100 most-populated metro areas for the small-business environment. Poor performance for earnings for small-business employees and net small-business job growth drove the ranking, but they weren’t the only pieces of an unsavory performance.

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April 15 brought a ranking for taxpayer return on investment (what else should you measure on Tax Day?). Rhode Island came in eighth worst, although the constituent parts were an interesting mix of metrics. For example, the Ocean State ranked eighth best for safety and 16th best for pollution. Those stellar performances were dragged down by health (No. 33), economy (No. 36), education (No. 37), infrastructure (No. 42) and tax rate (No. 48). Oh, and we ranked last in the nation for the quality of our roads and bridges.

Perhaps the most damning part of the ranking was Rhode Island’s standing relative to the rest of New England, all of which were better than the Ocean State’s rank of No. 42 overall. New Hampshire came in at No. 8, Vermont at No. 13, Massachusetts at No. 19, Maine at No. 28 and Connecticut at No. 33.

Why do these stories drive so much traffic to our site? And they do, perhaps in the way that an accident draws onlookers. Except of course, Rhode Island is the victim in this scenario.

The Ocean State takes pride in its Independent Man mythology. And he does make an impression on top of the Statehouse. But perhaps striking out on our own – and garnering all that recognition – is not all it is cracked up to be at all times. •

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