Business climate. The environment. Health care. Crime. Quality of life.

Everyone seems to have an opinion of what state government should do about them. Unfortunately, so many of the arguments pertaining to these subjects seem to take place in a vacuum, as if Maine was alone in the world.

What is often missing is context; in particular, how Maine compares to other states.

I decided to look at some recent surveys and contrast Maine with three other states with approximately the same population: Hawaii, Idaho and New Hampshire. While this isn’t a formal analysis, I thought putting these states side-by-side on a few issues could create some awareness for what we have here, in this state.

There’s no shortage of indexes and surveys that measure key issues. For example, the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) issued a comprehensive report titled the Development Report Card for the States in 2007. This survey ranked the states for economic development and scored them for performance, business vitality and development capacity. Another survey is Forbes magazine’s “Best States for Business,” released last month. It ranked business costs, regulatory environment and quality of life among other factors.

The Forbes survey reveals Maine has comparatively high business costs. It ranks 43rd, above Idaho (11th) and New Hampshire (39th) but better than Hawaii (47th). It also calculated Maine has a poor regulatory environment, vis–vis business. Maine is 46th in the nation. By contrast, Hawaii, Idaho and New Hampshire all have better regulatory environments than our state, according to Forbes.

However the CFED report gave Maine better marks than Hawaii, Idaho and New Hampshire in terms of industrial diversity. This category is described as “indicating the degree of diversity among industries within the state’s traded sector (in) 2004.” Maine was in the middle, ranking 25th. New Hampshire was 32nd, Idaho was 41st while Hawaii was one of the least diversified in the nation at 47th.

Maine scored well with this same report on some key environmental indexes. It has the third highest rate of use of alternative energy in the nation (Idaho has the fifth highest, New Hampshire the 10th highest and Hawaii the 20th highest). Maine also has the 12th highest rate of recycled waste (Idaho has the 43rd highest, New Hampshire the 19th highest and Hawaii the 23rd highest).

Health care issues are so varied and complex that I could have written a whole column comparing Maine to other states. One indicator, however, stood out to me: Maine’s rate of uninsured, low-income children. The CFED report put together the three-year average from 2002-2004 of kids “under 19 years of age at or below 200 percent of the poverty line without health insurance” and found Maine to have the fourth lowest rate of all the states. While Hawaii did better (2nd lowest), we outdistanced both New Hampshire (12th lowest) and Idaho (31st lowest).

Comparatively speaking, Maine is a pretty safe state. According to the CFED report, we have the fifth lowest crime rate; lower than Idaho (15th) and Hawaii (46th). But our friends in the Granite State have the bragging rights in this category: they have the third lowest crime rate.

Quality of life is an interesting category in and of-itself. Just how do you define it? The Forbes survey created their calculations through an index of poverty rates, cost of living, crime, health and schools. Maine ended up 16th highest in the nation, beating Idaho (27th) and Hawaii (33rd). Again, Maine lagged behind New Hampshire, which has the fifth highest in the nation.

Some of the results of these comparisons are common sense to many: Maine needs to improve its regulatory environment and lower its business costs. Others don’t get emphasized nearly as much as they deserve, though: Maine has an above-average quality of life, a low crime rate and cares about the health of its poor kids. We also have more economic diversity than many states and hold a genuine reverence for the environment.

Whenever I hear people criticize Maine, I think to myself: Compared to what? Is Maine really that much worse than other places in the country? Hardly. While there is a host of reform measures that I would love to see passed in Augusta, we are doing many things right. Many want to believe that “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” In many cases, it really isn’t.

Karl Trautman is chairperson of the social sciences department at Central Maine Community College. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Hawaii. He can be reached at [email protected].