Tax Freedom Day

President Obama is from Illinois and he is running our nation like the politicians of Illinois run their state with lots of wasteful spending and too many high taxes.

It’s Tax Freedom Day, So Congratulations (if You Don’t Live in New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois, etc)

April 18, 2013 by Dan Mitchell

It’s time to celebrate.

That’s because we have reached Tax Freedom Day, meaning that – in the aggregate – we have finally earned enough money to pay for all the federal, state, and local taxes that will be imposed on us this year by our political masters.

But we’re not collectivists, so aggregate measures don’t really matter. Our individual tax burdens can vary considerably depending on the level and composition of our income, as well as the state in which we live.

Speaking of that, the good folks of North Dakota are the only ones actually celebrating Tax Freedom Day on this exact date. If you look at the map, Tax Freedom Day is as early as late March for residents of Louisiana and Mississippi, and as late as May for the unfortunate residents of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

Tax Freedom Day Map

You’ll notice, by the way, that Tax Freedom Day is correlated with average state income. That’s one of the reasons why low-income states tend to get better scores. Simply stated, it’s hard to collect a lot of revenue from people who don’t have much money.

And a state that historically has been wealthy, like Connecticut, will probably collect a lot of revenue even if it has a good tax system (though, for the record, Connecticut has veered dramatically in the wrong direction in the past couple of decades).

So if you want to measure whether a state has a good or bad tax system, I recommend the “fiscal” and “tax burden” categories in the “Freedom Index” from the Mercatus Center. Using that measure, South Dakota gets the best score (compared to the 6th-best score using Tax Freedom Day).

P.S. If you like maps, here are some interesting ones, starting with some international comparisons.

Here are some good state maps with useful information.

There’s even a local map.

 

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By Everette Hatcher III, on April 19, 2013 at 7:34 am, under Cato Institute, Economist Dan Mitchell, President Obama, spending out of control, Taxes. No Comments
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