Here are the 10 states with the highest taxes, including property, individual income, sales, alcoholic beverages, tobacco, motor vehicles, hunting and fishing, motor fuels, death and gift taxes, as well as insurance premiums. The per capita tax was derived by adding up all the taxes and dividing the total by the number of citizens. 1. Vermont, $3,861 2. Hawaii, $3,856 3. Connecticut, $3,596 4. Minnesota, $3,203 5. New Jersey, $3,024 6. New York, $3,019 7. Massachusetts, $2,953 8. Washington, $2,553 9. Wyoming, $2,357 10. Pennsylvania, $2,223 Source: Forbes, Matt Woolsey (03/30/2009)
The data is meaningless without knowing how much those people made. I am pretty sure Connecticut is always near the top for having the highest average household income. So it would make sense to see them near the top of the taxes-paid list. How about the states ranked by percentage instead of absolute dollars?
That's kind of a stupid way to do it. Add up all taxes divided by the number of citizens? For this to be a true reflection, that would have to assumes a flat tax rate. this will be really skewed in a state of high income earners.
The tax paid per capita is a perfectly reasonable thing to compute. It might not be the data you are most interested in seeing, but there isn't anything "stupid" about it. barfo
It is stupid. I don't think its an accurate reflection of the taxation when the results can be skewed by a few individuals at the top, who pay a majority of the taxes overall.
Yeah, they are probably similar, but I know some states like Florida and New Hampshire don't have any sales tax, so they would probably be down there.
I don't think this really matters. most of the taxes are based on total tax collected divided by the number of people. the higher the per capita income is, the higher the per capita tax collected will be.
Aside from the fact that he didn't include Oregon in the listing, I don't see why it is stupid. barfo
Thanks for the links, Anima. Oregon is #11 on that list. The 11th lowest state tax burden. So the answer to the question posed in the thread is "nope, not relative to most other states". barfo
It's "stupid" because it's irrelevant to the thread title. It's interesting at some level, because it shows how much government consumes per citizen in any given state, but it's irrelevant because it doesn't take into consideration how much money is made per citizen. Without normalizing for income levels, you potentially get a mixed bag of poor states that tax the hell out of its citizens and wealthy states that take a smaller cut. Taxes aren't "bad" or "good" unless one looks at things from a taxpayer's perspective, and leaving the income out of the equation renders this list incapable of giving us that perspective. Ed O.
