Last Thursday I put up a short post about CNBC’s 2025 “Top States for Business” and the fact that Georgia ranked 7th overall and had scored particularly poorly in the network’s Quality of Life category. Georgia ranked 45th out of the 50 states in that category (down from 40th in 2024) and earned an F from the business network.

I noted in that piece that CNBC didn’t provide any significant narrative on the category rankings for each state.

Well, this morning, that changed. Late this morning, CNBC went up on its website with a story that should produce a bit of heartburn in Governor Brian Kemp’s office and at the Department of Economic Development.

Under the headline “These states are America’s worst for quality of life in 2025,” CNBC’s Scott Cohn wrote:

“Some states are particularly welcoming to workers. These are not those states. They are the states with America’s worst quality of life in 2025.”

The CNBC piece goes on to offer some detail and rationale for each of the states in its bottom 10. Georgia earned a paltry 89 points out of a possible 265 and was one of six states to get a completely failing grade. That put us behind Arkansas and Alabama and just barely ahead of Louisiana.

Here’s CNBC’s report on Georgia’s Quality of Life performance:

“While the overall violent crime rate in Georgia is roughly in line with the national average, it has one of the highest homicide rates in the country.

“That is but one factor in an overall unhealthy environment in The Peach State. More than 11% of the population lacks health insurance, the third-highest rate in the country. The state ranks 40th for primary care doctors per capita, and 48th for mental health providers, according to the United Health Foundation.

“The Commonwealth Fund ranks Georgia 45th in its latest Scorecard on State Health System Performance, which grades the states on health care access, prevention and treatment, efficiency, healthy lives, and health disparities.

“Georgia is another one of the five states with no anti-discrimination protections for non-disabled people, and it offers few protections for workers beyond a guarantee of equal pay based on race and gender.”

Here’s a link to the CNBC piece: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/americas-worst-places-quality-of-life-top-states-for-business.html

I’ll have more on this later.