This issue of The Economist has a look at the American economy. Offsetting the predictable despair over the antics and inaction in D.C. is a positive assessment of American entrepreneurs and the dynamism in the states, what they call the America that works. A couple of excerpts then I encourage you to RTWT.

Pressed for cash, states are adopting sweeping reforms as they vie to attract investments and migrants. Louisiana and Nebraska want to abolish corporate and personal income taxes. Kansas has created a post called “the Repealer” to get rid of red tape and pays a “bounty” to high schools for every vocational qualification their students earn in certain fields; Ohio has privatised its economic-development agency; Virginia has just reformed its petrol-tax system.

In this second, can-do America, creative policymaking is being applied to the very problems Congress runs away from, like infrastructure spending.

Infrastructure and education.

Even education is showing some signs of change. The states are giving America’s schools their biggest overhaul in living memory. Forty-five of them are developing new curriculums. Tests are becoming more rigorous, and schools and teachers are at last being held accountable for results. Thirty-eight states have reformed teachers’ pay, tying it, in many instances, to their students’ exam results. Forty-two now allow independently managed, but government-funded, “charter schools”.

In sum:

Regulation, innovation, infrastructure, education: each of these is crucial to competitiveness. Put together the small things happening in the states, and they become something rather big. That is the essence of the America that works.

That’s about it. And it’s a useful reminder of the competition our state faces from the “laboratories of democracy” that vie for investment and jobs.