States With Lowest Taxes Overall - In this study, we define a state's tax burden as the state and local taxes paid by a state's residents divided by that state's share of gross national product. This study's contribution to our understanding of real tax burdens focuses on the fact that each of us pays state and local taxes not only to our own place of residence, but also to state and territory governments in which we do not live.
This shifting of taxes across state lines is the result of many factors, including our movement across state lines during work and leisure time and the interconnectedness of national economies. However, the biggest driver of this phenomenon is the reality that the ultimate burden of taxation often falls on entities other than those writing checks to the government.
States With Lowest Taxes Overall
Taxation is a measure of which entity pays the tax. But there are two different types of taxation:
Who Pays? 6th Edition
The legal burden of taxes is borne by those who have a legal obligation to pay taxes to state and local governments. Statutory events are established by law and tell us which individuals or companies must send tax payments to state and local treasuries.
The legal impact of taxes is very different from the ultimate economic burden. Because taxes affect the relative prices that people face, they induce changes in individual behavior. These tax-induced changes in behavior shift some (or all) of the economic burden of taxes from those who bear the legal burden to the rest of society. For example, the legal burden of corporate income tax usually falls on companies. But economists agree that some of these taxes are passed on to others, such as higher prices for consumers, lower wages for workers, reduced returns for shareholders, or some combination of the three.
Taking into account these tax-induced changes in behavior in the economy is called the final distribution of the economic burden of taxes
. This measure is also called the tax burden faced by individuals such as consumers, workers and investors.
States With The Highest (and Lowest) Taxes For Retirees
Besides the fact that the tax burden is often borne by many people who do not pay directly, the taxes imposed by state and local governments are often borne—in the legal and economic sense—by expatriates. This phenomenon is known when part of the tax burden imposed in one state is borne by residents of another place
Alaska provides good examples of tax exporting. Sixty percent of Alaska's state and local tax revenue in 2022 will come from residents of other states. The burden of Alaska's oil tax does not fall primarily on Alaskans. Ignoring this fact and directly comparing Alaskan tax collected to Alaskan income makes the tax burden on Alaskans appear much higher than it really is.
This study suggests that most of the financial burden of the severance tax falls on oil industry investors, not Alaska taxpayers. It should be noted that this study does not suggest that this burden falls on consumers (including drivers who buy motor fuel), as these prices are determined by global energy markets. The same is true for states like North Dakota and Wyoming, where once the distribution is granted, the total tax burden drops from the highest in the nation to the lowest.
Resource-rich countries like these are just a few extreme examples of tax exporting. In addition to offloading many tax costs to investors, major tourist destinations like Florida and Nevada can often tax out-of-state tourists. Some states have large numbers of residents who work out of state and pay personal income tax to the states in which they work. When a metropolitan area attracts workers from neighboring states, much of the state's wage income can be earned by cross-border commuters. On the other hand, some countries have reciprocity agreements where they tax their own residents regardless of where they work. This study examines these types of contracts.
States With The Lowest Taxes In 2022
Each country's economic activities are different, as is each country's tax code. As a result, everyone differs in their ability to export their tax burden. Economists have studied this phenomenon since at least the 1960s, when Charles McClure estimated that states derive 15 to 35 percent of their tax revenue from immigrants.[1]
Much of this interstate tax collection occurs without special effort on the part of state and local legislators or tax collectors. Tourists spend when they travel, and many of these transactions are taxed. People who own property outside the state pay property tax in those states. The burden of business taxes is borne by the employees, shareholders and customers of these businesses, wherever they are located. In many states, however, legislators have made a conscious effort to specifically tax immigrants. Common examples include tax increases on hotel rooms, rental cars, restaurant meals, and local sales taxes in resort areas.
The distinction between tax burden and tax collection is critical to understanding the transfer of taxes across state lines. Because taxes collected are an estimate of tax payments to state and local governments, they measure only statutory events. In contrast, our estimates of tax burdens allow taxes to be economically affected by states. The figures in this report therefore attempt to measure the economic impact of taxes rather than the legal impact.
Tax collection is useful for certain purposes and is often cited. However, dividing the total taxes collected by state governments by the state's total revenue is not an accurate measure of a state's overall tax burden because it does not accurately reflect the taxes actually paid from that state's revenue.
Ranking State And Local Sales Taxes
The authoritative source of data on state and local tax collections is the Census Bureau's Division of State and Local Government Finance, which serves as the primary input and starting point for our tax burden model. Here are some additional examples of the difference between tax collections (calculated by the Census Bureau) and our tax burden projections:
In addition to apportioning the taxes cited above, this study also allows for taxes on corporate income, commercial and residential property, tourism, and personal income that are located outside the taxpayer's country of residence.
We include all taxes reported by the Census Bureau's Finance Division, the most comprehensive source of data on state and local tax collections and the starting point for our tax burden model. These taxes are:
Our unit of time is the calendar year. Fiscal year data from states is adjusted to match the calendar year. The state and local tax burden projections for calendar year 2022 presented in this document are based on the most recent data available from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and all other available data sources. Latest economic data.
Cities With The Lowest Tax Rates
Measures of tax burden are not measures of the size of government in a country, nor are they technically a measure of it
The tax burden faced by residents of a state (this study excludes compliance costs and economic efficiency losses). Furthermore, the tax burden estimates presented here do not take into account the returns from this tax in the form of government spending. However, these shortcomings are not unique to our estimates of the tax burden.
It should also be noted that this tax burden is not calculated on individual taxpayers. Our tax burden is calculated based on the total amount of state and local taxes, not the taxes paid by an individual. We collect data on the total income earned in a state (all residents collectively) and calculate the total share that goes to state and local taxes.
State and local tax burdens for each resident in the 50 states are very close as a share of income. This makes sense given that state and local governments fund similar activities such as public education, transportation, prison systems and health care programs, often under the same federal mandates. Also, tax competition between states can often lead to dramatic differences in tax levels between similar neighboring states.
U.s. Cities With The Highest And Lowest Property Taxes
Because we present tax burden as a share of income as a relative ranking of the 50 states, small changes in taxes or income can lead to dramatic changes in rank. For example, Oklahoma (ranked 10th) and Ohio (ranked 24th) differ by just over a percentage point. The rise in tax revenue during the pandemic not only increased the overall tax burden, but also widened disparities between states. In our last pre-pandemic analysis, the 20 middle-ranked states differed by less than one percentage point in effective rates, but the gap between New Hampshire (ranked 16th) and Maryland (ranked 35th) in 2022 was 1.8 percentage points. While the weights are clustered in the center of the distribution, the upper and lower states can differ significantly.
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