Pegasus Institute

A few hundred miles of land and 30 counties make up the long border between Tennessee and Kentucky. The states have the same terrain, and virtually the same culture, but considerably different tax structures and economic outcomes. Many of the individuals who live in the sixteen Kentucky counties share anecdotes about the growth they’ve witnessed on the opposite side of the border, sometimes to the detriment of their home counties. We took a look at some of the data to see if their stories aligned. Calculations of wealth migration and increases along the border gave us gut wrenching results. Between 1992 and 2015, according to IRS and Census data, the Tennessee counties along the Kentucky bor

The opioid crisis is a frequently used as a catch-all for Kentucky's policy problems, attributing it to everything from the states poor health outcomes to Louisville’s unprecedented homicide spike. Recently, Kentucky’s workforce development problems and low labor force participation rate have joined the long list of things attributed to the opioid crisis. As we can tell, despite anecdotes, there is no notable data to support this contention. In fact, as the opioid crisis has grown, Kentucky's labor force participation has increased. Kentucky has a heroin crisis, and it has an abysmal labor force participation rate, but there isn’t notable data to indicate that the crisis is a leading cause i