Sidebar: Credit Going South

Recently I made some large purchases and took advantage of what used to be known as “same as cash” payment terms. So I thought it might be a wise thing to see how this was affecting my credit score. I tried a site called “My FICO” and there it was—a map of the United States allowing a mouse-over where you could see the average FICO for every state. And of course, my immediate thought was this was the perfect vehicle to look at the red states and the blue states to see if there was anything that could be added to my red state socialism compilation. So far I have looked at:

1. State expenditures of federal tax dollars versus amount of taxes paid in by the state

2. Food stamp usage

3. Percent of uninsured (medical)

4. Percent of obese

5. Percent of Diabetics

6. Percent of Heart Disease

7. Rate of Cancer Mortality

8. Most versus least “peaceful”

9. Per capita on-line porn subscriptions

10. Smoking

11. Teen age pregnancies

12. Amount of debt per capita

13. Job opportunities

Because of the large number of uninsured, the red states are featured predominantly as part of the top ten least healthy, while blue states dominate the most healthy. For the first 11 categories, the red states exceed the blue states (are “worse”), particularly those red states in the Bible belt: Louisana, Mississippi, Georgia, etc. They are  better, however, in the last two: job opportunities and amount of debt per capita.

The “new” category is FICO scores, the well known measure of credit worthiness. I’ve heard that over 60 percent of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills, which may be related to this, although one would think with a lot less debt per capita it might not be so. The average FICO for the top ten least healthy states (80% red) is 667; the average FICO for the top ten most healthy states (80% blue) is 708. Now this is just an average without calculating in the populations, so it may be off slightly. But it just adds fuel to the fire. Every red state score was below 700, and almost every blue state score was above (very  blue state California was a 691).  Maybe the stress of bad credit affects one's health adversely?

I also believe what could be pulling down some of these scores is the degree of how the housing crash affected that state: in particular, Nevada (665) and Florida (673). California, as noted above, has also had problems in this area and is below 700 as well.

Another category I took a look at but got somewhat mixed results was liquor consumption. Of course, you’d get zero in a red state like Utah (at least the last time I was actually there in the late 1980’s, liquor could not be sold, so things may have changed), and there are many “dry” counties in red state Tennessee, so this might be a difficult measure. You also have to take into account the mostly red Appalachian “moonshine” states where who-knows-what is going on. But I found that the most-liquor-per-capita state was blue New Hampshire, and it was due to the fact they did not tax liquor, which meant there were probably people taking advantage of this in the nearby states.

If you use a measure called “binge drinking”—defined as “adults having five or more drinks on one occasion”—it appears that the least healthy states binge drink substantially less. Red states Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Tennessee rank in the bottom five (Tennessee is at the bottom with Utah), while the top five include Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Iowa and Rhode Island. So that’s one more we can add to the positive side for the red states.  One more to make three out of 13.