Fiscal Sanity: Which political party is better at managing taxpayer dollars? The latest ranking of states' fiscal condition offers an unequivocal answer.

For several years, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has ranked states based on five measures of their financial condition: cash solvency, budget solvency, the ability to meet long-term spending commitments, state spending and taxes as a share of personal income, and unfunded pension liabilities and debt.

And lest anyone think that Mercatus — a free-market-oriented group — is fudging the numbers, note that the data used to compile these rankings all come from official state annual financial reports and from state actuarial reports.

For 2016, the latest year for which data are available, the top five most fiscally sound states were, in order: Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee, Florida and Oklahoma.

The five worst states, starting at the bottom: Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Kentucky.

Notice anything similar in these groupings? We did. All but one of the top five are solidly Republican states. All but one of the bottom five are solidly Democratic.

Not An Aberration

This isn't some one-year aberration, either.

For the first time this year, Mercatus produced rankings from 2006 through 2016.

What does that show?

Of the 10 states that show up most frequently at the bottom of the list since 2006, nine are solid blue states. Of the 10 states with consistently the best record, all but one are solidly red states. (See nearby table.)

There's another commonality between the best-run and worst-run states. Taxes.

As it turns out, states in the worst fiscal shape also tend to impose the highest tax rates in the nation. In fact, six of the 10 states that consistently show up as the least fiscally solvent rank in the Top 10 for highest taxes as a share of income, according to the Tax Foundation.