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The state of the economy in California, except in the Silicon Valley sucks—lets get real. In a CNBC survey of the twenty best places to start a business, six of the cities are in Texas and zero are in the former Golden State. Would you start a business knowing government was controlling your wages and working conditions and you had little to say? Would you start a business knowing that some government agent could come into you facility and shut it down on the basis of a law no one knew about—but the unions are using to blackmail you into turning over your business to them? “Imagine having a business plan, the secured funding to start your own business and the option to choose anywhere in the country to set up shop. Where would you go? That’s the question we set out to answer in the first-ever CNBC Metro 20: America’s Best Places to Start a Business. Using private and government data, we looked at the 20 key criteria business owners should evaluate before choosing a business location, including tax and regulatory climate, workforce strength, access to capital and the cost of living. “ California has a $1.5 trillion debt, $500 billion of tax increases and bonds (including interest) on the November ballot, CalPERS has a $946 billion unfunded liability—the only question is whether the State of California will bankrupt its families and businesses when it goes belly-up? Is this a place to invest? Obviously the survey shows that business people are smarter than the unions and liberals—they go to Texas.

How we chose the Metro 20: America’s Best Places to Start a Business

David Spiegel, CNBC, 8/11/16

Imagine having a business plan, the secured funding to start your own business and the option to choose anywhere in the country to set up shop. Where would you go?

That’s the question we set out to answer in the first-ever CNBC Metro 20: America’s Best Places to Start a Business. Using private and government data, we looked at the 20 key criteria business owners should evaluate before choosing a business location, including tax and regulatory climate, workforce strength, access to capital and the cost of living.

Here’s how we did it: First, we used the established list of 389 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), published by the Census Bureau, to define metro areas. Then we pinpointed 107 areas that had a population of 500,000 or more. New York is the largest of these, with a population of more than 20 million; Lexington, Kentucky, is the smallest city to make the cut, with an estimated population of 500,535.

To source our information, we turned to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Energy Information Administration, Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, Biz2Credit, BizEquity and REIS. We also used CNBC’s America’s Top States for Business 2016 study for state-level scores on quality of life and business friendliness.

Some data was available only at the state level and not at the MSA level. This means in some categories, metro areas may have been helped or harmed by the business climate within their state. State-level data probably hurt cities in California, like San Francisco and San Jose, for example, while it improved the score of Texas cities, like McAllen and El Paso. In cases where the metro area was made up of territory in more than one state, we used a proportional weighted average of the different state scores (for example, the Washington, D.C., metro area includes the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia).

Data was collected and each criterion was then weighted using the results of a survey of U.S.-based members of YPO — a chief executive leadership organization with more than 24,000 members (CNBC and YPO have an exclusive editorial partnership). Members there cited quality of life, taxes and regulation as among the most important factors for choosing a place to start a business.

The criteria were sorted into five categories, which themselves were weighted in order of importance. Each MSA was assigned points depending on where it ranked in each individual criterion, and each category was valued between 100 and 500 points, for a total of 1,500 points possible. The metro areas with the 20 highest overall scores made the list.

The Top 20

Here is the ranking of this year’s top performers:

Austin, Texas Provo, Utah Washington, D.C. Denver Charlotte, North Carolina Houston Ogden, Utah Dallas Des Moines, Iowa San Antonio Richmond, Virginia McAllen, Texas Colorado Springs, Colorado Raleigh, North Carolina Sarasota, Florida El Paso, Texas Atlanta Salt Lake City Las Vegas Seattle