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I like how the only "midwest" city they list is Minneapolis, which isn't even the capital of Minnesota. Secondly, no cities in North or South Dakota? Some of the most thriving economies are in the Dakotas and have been for the last decade or more.

It just confirms how myopic people who live on the East Coast are about our "flyover" country.

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Cities in North and South Dakota are so small, though. I don't see how you could include Sioux Falls or Fargo in a map like this. You'd have to include about twenty cities in Texas. (Des Moines's inclusion is suprising to me, but the Des Moines area has almost as many people as all of North Dakota.)

When you're talking about any sort of economic or tax impact, cities of around 100,000 people are barely a suburb on a map like this. Hell, even after the super-charged growth of the last decade, the combined GDP of North and South Dakota is less than $100 billion. The Minneapolis metro area's GDP is over twice that.

Much of Minneapolis's GDP is based on raw materials out of North and South Dakota (along with rural parts of many other states). Judging economic impact on population is missing a lot of parts of an economy.

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