Founded in 1973, ALEC  is a nonpartisan membership association for state lawmakers who share a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty. Their vision and initiative resulted in the creation of a voluntary membership association for people who believed that government closest to the people was fundamentally more effective, more just, and a better guarantor of freedom than the distant, bloated federal government in Washington, D.C.

For more than 35 years, ALEC has enabled creating and delivering public policy ideas aimed at protecting and expanding our free society.  ALEC’s members, duly elected leaders of their state legislatures, use Jeffersonian principles to advise and inform legislative action across the country.

State Data Lab includes state Economic Outlook rankings from ALEC’s   Rich States Poor States  analysis, whose authors include Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore and Jonathan Williams.  Each state’s economic outlook ranking is a forward-looking measure of how each state can expect to perform economically based on 15 policy areas that have proven, over time, to mean greater economic success. 

We have found a relationship between state debt, as measured by our Taxpayer Burden, and ALEC’s economic outlook.  This picture tells the story: Lower Taxpayer Burden, Higher Economic Outlook

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