The numbers overall seem to contradict the Republican claim of economic wisdom and their converse claim that Democrats are economic disaster areas. I was struck by the fact that the top third of the list was all Democrat, and the bottom third was all Republican.

Of course, a lot depends on the statistics you incorporate to come up with a ranking like that. The source data is skewed a bit toward "populist" measures of prosperity: Jobs/unemployment, per-capita income, and inflation--things that impact income and cash flow for wage earners. It didn't include measures of prosperity more meaningful to Republicans, like growth in stock prices and personal wealth, which impact capital accumulation and matter to the "investor class".

I guess the message is that there's prosperity and then there's prosperity, and the choice of an economic platform isn't between a good one and a bad one, so much as it's a matter of choice who prospers and who doesn't under a given economic plan. Democrats want to spread the prosperity as widely as possible, while Republicans are more interested in prosperity at the top and view inequality of prosperity as just the natural order of things.

Democrats measure prosperity in terms of width, while Republicans measure prosperity in terms of height. 90 degrees at odds with each other. It's no wonder we can never see things the same way.