Texas nails it, thanks to the energy sector. California and Florida have plenty of energy resources too, but environmentalists won’t allow them to drill and boy does it show in the economic statistics. Interestingly, cities in states that vote Democrat were almost totally absent from the list.
Texas also benefits from what Forbes termed in an earlier article the “zone of sanity,”where the residential markets didn’t get caught up in the inflated prices of the housing bubble–and incidentally, where taxes tend to be low. That zone (be sure to check out the maps) runs right down the middle of the country from North Dakota to the Rio Grande Valley.
