Indiana’s attempt to take short cuts on education is costing us.

Ball State economist, Michael Hicks, has a column about Democratic run areas of the country getting richer while Republican run areas are getting poorer. He notes that the U.S. is seeing its best economic performance in the last half century but the benefits are not being distributed uniformly. He doesn’t lay the blame on one party or another because some of the underlying reasons were a long time in the making. But he does underscore the significance of educational attainment in the dynamic.

It is difficult to lay the blame for worsening economic conditions at the feet of one party or the other. For the past 50 years, there was considerable overlap in state policies, so conservative Democratic states behaved a lot like more progressive Republican states in tax, education and economic development policy.

However, today there is a growing understanding that differences in economic outcomes are mostly connected to differences in educational attainment between places. Other factors, like tax rates, tax structure, regulatory environment or economic development policy, are of declining importance.

I would go even farther in concluding that differences in tax policies explain almost none of the differences in affluence or growth. That is a major departure from the start of my career a quarter-century ago, when tax differences were important. Today, differences in economic conditions are almost exclusively caused by the level of education of residents.

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The 15 states that have seen the biggest relative drop in educational attainment are all solidly Republican states—and poor. Indiana ranks 10th on this list. The top 15 states are all solidly Democratic—and affluent. This gap will worsen as states with a large share of well-educated adults are attracting more, while states with a shortage are losing them.