Yet again, Colorado finds itself near the bottom nationally in two separate WalletHub rankings assessing the health of the economy for small businesses.
This ranking included a heavy weighting of jobs in most impacted industries. The Arts, Entertainment and Recreation industry in Colorado is only at 66% of its pre-pandemic employment level. https://t.co/BrQtdIuEnz
— Common Sense Institute (@CSInstituteCO) April 13, 2021
WalletHub ranked Colorado 48th out of 51 among states with the most potential to bounce back from the pandemic, trailing only Hawaii, Montana, and Nevada.
Their study used “data set ranges from the share of small businesses operating in high-risk industries to small-business credit conditions and the state’s small-business friendliness.”
The Centennial State actually scored number one nationally in terms of “small business financial conditions,” although that ranking appears to be an outlier because of Colorado’s high ratio of federal assistance compared to the state’s GDP.
In other words Colorado small businesses ranked high in terms of the amount of federal assistance they received, but only because Gov. Polis kept those businesses shut down for the better part of last year.
The rest of Colorado’s scores in the WalletHub study were not pretty.
41st – Share of Small Businesses Operating in High-Risk Industries
44th – Share of Small-Business Employees Operating in High-Risk Industries Among Total Small-Business Employees
48th – WalletHub’s “States Whose Weekly Unemployment Claims Are Recovering the Quickest” Score
37th – Business Vitality
32nd – Small-Business Credit Conditions
Colorado’s continued high weekly unemployment claims relative to the rest of the nation are especially troubling.
As of April 8, Colorado ranked an embarrassing 46th nationally in terms of weekly unemployment claims recovery since the outset of the pandemic.
The data suggests Polis’s poor weekly unemployment claim performance is something of a pattern for Democrat governors.
Fortunately for small business owners, Polis did recently acknowledge the pandemic will be over by this July.
If woke Democrats hadn’t dropped the All-Star game in Polis’s lap, who knows how much longer Colorado’s job creators would have suffered.
Regardless, the WalletHub studies make clear Polis’s shutdowns have left small business owners with an extremely challenging path to recovery.