This page combines two fundamentally different types of data, and telling them apart is the key to using it well. The Public Opinion and Congress Opinion leaderboards rank states and members by anonymous, unmoderated visitor reactions — a temperature check on public sentiment. The Spending Rankings and Budget Balance leaderboards, by contrast, rank states purely on official, sourced budget figures. One measures how people feel; the other measures what actually happened. Neither is a substitute for the other, and this page is designed to let you look at both without confusing them.
What "Outrageous," "Wasteful," "Reasonable," and "Can't Be Serious" Mean
The four reaction categories used across this site's opinion leaderboards are deliberately informal, and that's the point — they're a quick emotional read, not a rigorous rating scale. Outrageous and Wasteful register disapproval (with "Outrageous" generally signaling a stronger reaction than "Wasteful"), Reasonable signals approval or at least acceptance, and Can't Be Serious is typically used for figures visitors find surprising or absurd, whether in a critical or amused sense. Anyone can react to any state or Congress member without creating an account, which keeps participation low-friction but also means reaction counts reflect whoever happened to visit and click — not a representative sample of the public, and not weighted by expertise, residency, or anything else. A state or member with very few total reactions can swing wildly with just one or two more clicks; a state or member with thousands of reactions is more stable, but "stable" doesn't mean "correct." Read the opinion leaderboards as a conversation starter, not a verdict.
Understanding the Spending Rankings
The Spending Rankings tabs let you sort all 50 states by Total Budget, Per Capita spending, or by individual category (Education, Healthcare, Transportation, Public Safety, Debt Service). These two default views tell very different stories, and mixing them up is the single most common mistake in reading state spending data. Total Budget rankings are dominated by population — California and Texas top that list mainly because they're the two most populous states, not because they spend unusually generously per resident. Per Capita rankings divide total spending by population, which controls for size and generally gives a fairer sense of spending intensity — though even per-capita figures need context, since states with older populations, more rural geography, or higher costs of living naturally spend more per resident to deliver the same services. The category-specific tabs (Education, Healthcare, etc.) let you isolate one area at a time, which is useful for comparing, say, how two neighboring states with similar populations differ in healthcare spending specifically.
Reading the Budget Balance Leaderboard
This ranks states by the gap between what they raised in revenue and what they spent (Revenue − Spending) for the year measured. A positive number means a state ran a surplus; a negative number means a deficit funded by reserves, borrowing, or one-time revenue. Because 49 of the 50 states are required to balance their operating budgets by law (see our state budgets guide for more), large recurring deficits in this data are unusual and typically reflect either a state drawing down reserve funds during a temporary downturn, capital spending financed by bonds outside the operating budget, or a one-year snapshot that doesn't reflect the state's longer-run fiscal position. A single year's balance figure is a useful signal, not a complete verdict on a state's fiscal health.
Interpreting Rankings Responsibly
It's tempting to treat "ranked #1 in spending" as automatically good or bad news, but spending levels alone don't tell you about outcomes, efficiency, or need. A state that spends more per resident on healthcare might have an older population with genuinely greater medical needs, or it might be spending inefficiently — the ranking alone can't distinguish between those explanations. Likewise, a state near the bottom of a spending category isn't necessarily "efficient"; it might simply be underfunding a program relative to need. These leaderboards are a starting point for asking better questions about state fiscal policy, not a final answer about which states are doing it "right."