By Jim Jones
In 1980, Neil Diamond released his smash hit “America.” The chorus went, “They’re coming to America,” and for a long time it was almost as popular as the National Anthem at patriotic celebrations. Today that is probably not true, but someone ought to write a new song called “They’re Coming to Tennessee.” Since COVID, Tennessee has become a destination for teleworkers. In recent years it has become a destination for American political refugees. Most recently, it is a destination for “half‑backs,” people from northern blue states who went to Florida for the no‑state‑tax promise and then discovered the cost of living and crowded metro areas were not what they expected, so they moved back north and stopped in Tennessee and the Carolinas instead.
On July 11, 2026, CNBC declared Tennessee the worst state in America to live in. That is one of those headlines designed to travel fast because it is insulting, absolute, and just believable enough to make people angry (click here). The problem is not that CNBC has no data. The problem is that their data tells only part of the story, and in Tennessee, the missing part matters more than the data.
When you look at the fine print, according to CNBC’s 2026 quality of life ranking, Tennessee landed at the bottom because of crime, worker protections, health care access, childcare, and what they call inclusiveness. On their scorecard, Tennessee still does well for business and air quality, but it gets crushed on the social and quality of life side of the ledger. That is how a state can be good enough for companies to invest in and somehow still be labeled the worst place in America for people to live.
That sounds persuasive until you stop and ask a very basic question.
Which Tennessee?
The Tennessee of Beale Street? The Tennessee of Broadway? The Tennessee of Bell Buckle? The Tennessee of Gatlinburg? The Tennessee of Bristol Motor Speedway and the Birthplace of Country Music? Or the Tennessee of church steeples, back roads, and front porches?
Are they talking about Memphis, where crime has been a real and obvious problem for years? Are they talking about Nashville, where the city’s politics, growth, tax base, and crime profile make it almost a world apart from the rest of the state? Are they talking about Chattanooga and Knoxville, which carry urban problems of their own? Or are they talking about the Tennessee most people actually know, where life is built around churches, schools, back roads, family ties, and communities that feel nothing like a national media stereotype?
That is the first weakness in the CNBC story. A lot of what drags Tennessee down comes from a handful of large cities, and those cities do not represent the experience of the whole state. If Memphis has terrible crime numbers, and Nashville has higher crime and a very different political culture than rural Tennessee, that affects the statewide ranking. But it does not mean the whole state feels like downtown Memphis at midnight or Broadway on a Saturday night. It means averages can be technically true and deeply misleading at the same time.
The strange part is that the same cities that drive a lot of the bad headlines also help keep the rest of the state running. Tennessee’s tax and spending pattern shows that most counties receive more from the state than they send in, while places like Nashville and Williamson County generate far more revenue than they get back. In plain English, a small number of urban and suburban counties help subsidize the rest of the state. So, the same metro areas that can make Tennessee look worse in national rankings are also carrying much of the financial load.
That should matter when people start throwing around the phrase “worst state.” If the urban counties are producing a large share of the crime statistics, a large share of the political friction, and a large share of the tax revenue, then you are not really talking about one uniform statewide reality. You are talking about a state with radically different regions that get flattened into a single label for the sake of a media ranking.
Then there is the crime issue itself, which is real. Tennessee’s big cities have had serious problems, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Memphis has long been one of the most dangerous cities in America, and that has cast a shadow over the whole state. Data from recent years shows that Tennessee’s violent crime rate is still higher than the national average, even though it has been trending down. CNBC is not inventing that part.
Even here, the story is changing faster than the ranking reflects. Under the current administration, the federal government turned Memphis into a law‑and‑order case study.
The Memphis Safe Task Force, a joint operation involving the Tennessee National Guard and multiple federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, was sent in to crack down on gangs, violent offenders, and repeat criminals. Public briefings report thousands of arrests, more than a thousand illegal firearms seized, and a sharp drop in major crime categories. That is Washington looking at a city and deciding the local approach was not enough.
The task force did something else that almost sounds unbelievable until you read the numbers. It found missing children. First the count was in the dozens. Then it moved past one hundred. By the spring of 2026, public updates were reporting around one hundred fifty missing children located by the task force. Memphis was not just dealing with crime in the abstract. It was dealing with a level of disorder where children were disappearing and had to be actively recovered by a task force.
That matters for two reasons. First, it shows that Tennessee’s crime problem has been heavily concentrated in a place that became serious enough for a federal crackdown. Second, it shows how misleading it is to take those numbers, smear them across the whole map, and say that Johnson City, Cookeville, Greeneville, or a quiet county road in East Tennessee is the same kind of place. It is not.
CNBC also points to drug deaths. They note that Tennessee has one of the highest rates of drug‑related deaths in the country, ranking near the top nationally according to the United Health Foundation. Fentanyl and other opioids have hit this state hard, especially in and around urban areas. There are signs that the picture in places like Nashville is starting to change. Some local reporting suggests fentanyl deaths there may be easing, crediting a mix of state enforcement and federal pressure on trafficking and cartel activity. The statewide statistics that CNBC uses still reflect the broader drug‑death problem, and any local improvements have not yet changed Tennessee’s overall ranking.
Then we get to what CNBC calls inclusiveness, which is where the ranking moves beyond measuring conditions and begins measuring values. Tennessee scores poorly because of its policies on LGBTQ issues. CNBC points to the state’s bathroom law, restrictions on local anti‑discrimination ordinances, and Governor Bill Lee’s “Nuclear Family Month” proclamation, along with laws affecting transgender youth, drag performances, education, adoption, and marriage. In CNBC’s scoring system, these are not simply political differences. They are treated as evidence that Tennessee has chosen the wrong side of the culture debate.
Those issues are real, and so are the concerns they raise. A same‑sex couple who worries about equal treatment by a hospital or financial institution has legitimate concerns. A transgender person who feels targeted by state law has legitimate concerns as well. But it is equally true that CNBC’s quality‑of‑life ranking assumes those issues should carry a particular weight. That is not an objective measurement. It reflects a particular worldview about what makes a good society.
That is where my disagreement begins. CNBC can measure worker protections, crime, health care access, drug deaths, and legal policies. What it cannot measure is why people choose to live where they do, why they leave, and why so many eventually come back once they have the freedom to decide for themselves.
Sometimes opportunity takes us away from home. Careers, education, military service, and better‑paying jobs often require people to move where the work is. But once those obligations begin to fade, many people ask a different question. They stop asking, “Where can I make the most money?” and start asking, “Where do I want to build the rest of my life?” For many people, that answer is Tennessee. It is not because of any survey or ranking. It is because they value things that cannot be measured on a spreadsheet. They value lower taxes, a lower cost of living, open roads, mountains, lakes, family, community, and the freedom to live the kind of life they choose. There is no box on CNBC’s form for family roots. There is no box for the distance to your nearest neighbor. There is no metric for the kind of peace that comes from lower‑cost living, hills and backyards, and a life that feels less crowded and less managed. There is no way for their ranking to capture the difference between a place that is economically useful and a place that is home.
The same thing shows up in how they talk about wages and worker protections. Tennessee gets judged harshly because it does not have the kind of labor rules and state minimum wage standards that CNBC likes. But real life is more complicated than that. Some businesses pay badly and always will. Others pay well because they know a reliable worker is worth keeping. A person can still build a decent life in Tennessee if they have skills, mobility, and the willingness to go hunt for the right opportunity. That is not a slogan. That is how a lot of us have actually lived.
Tennessee does not set its own minimum wage, so it defaults to the federal rate of 7.25 dollars an hour, which works out to about 15,000 dollars a year for a full‑time worker. That leaves a single person hovering right around the poverty line and anyone trying to support a family clearly below it. In one of the most affordable states in the country, that should tell you something about what the “floor” really is. When your pay is tied to minimum wage, you are agreeing to live at the edge of poverty in a cheap state, and employers are only required to keep you there. States that advertise a higher minimum wage often end up with higher prices across the board, which means the buying power of that bigger number does not rise as much as people think. Minimum wage can feel less like a ladder and more like a label for the level you are expected to stay at.
The point is not that every job in Tennessee traps you at the floor. The point is that if you treat the floor as your ceiling, you will stay there, even in a cheap state.
More recently, I met a guy in his early twenties who works at a local bakery. We decided to go motorcycle riding one day. The bakery is a very nice place, and it is common to wait fifteen to thirty minutes to get one of their treats. I thought he was in college. He said no. He did not want to spend that kind of money on something he was not sure about. Fair enough. On that ride I asked him how much he made at the bakery. He said the owners collect the tips and each month look at how many hours each employee works. They divide the tip pool based on hours worked. With his hourly wage, which is well above minimum, and his share of the tips, he makes about fifty thousand dollars a year.
Tennessee is in the Bible Belt. God, guns, and high school football are still a big deal for many people. Tennessee just passed new legislation this year that allows people to use deadly force to protect their property, with limits. Note for anyone listening or reading this, that is not a legal opinion. You need to check the laws yourself.
Is Tennessee perfect? Of course not. Crime in Memphis has been notorious. I personally refused to go there for years because of what I had heard. In September, after President Trump sent in federal muscle, my friend and I rode our motorcycles through Memphis on a Friday night about eight o’clock on our way to Texas. There were state police with a car pulled over every half mile on both sides of the road. A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited Beale Street on a Saturday night. It was heavily patrolled and we felt safe. By the way, the ribs there are excellent.
Rural health care access is a real problem. Political battles over marriage, gender, and civil rights are real too. But calling Tennessee the worst state to live in says more about CNBC’s idea of what life should look like than it does about what life here actually is.
I have a degree in sociology. One of the first things you learn about surveys and the data is that you can manipulate them almost any way your customer wants. Just look at election polls. If you could see the raw data, you would often find that the people surveyed are in areas that lean toward the wanted outcome.
If your definition of a good life is a national checklist built around progressive labor policy, legal inclusiveness scores, and the worst crime and drug numbers from a handful of cities, Tennessee is going to do badly. If your definition includes freedom, opportunity, family, cost of living, room to breathe, and the chance to come back home once you have made your way in the world, then Tennessee looks very different.
In the past five years, Tennessee has added about 404,000 residents. That is roughly the equivalent of adding a city larger than Knoxville, nearly two Chattanoogas, and about six percent population growth in just five years.
That is why I do not buy the headline. CNBC graded Tennessee on a formula. Many have graded it by moving trucks coming here. The rest of us have to judge it by whether it is a place worth building a life in. Those are not the same question, and they do not produce the same answer.
Leave a comment and let me know what your thoughts are or what your experience has been with your state.
Thank you!
Jim (D-Minus) Jones
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