April 12, 2006
State and Local Tax Burdens Compared to Other U.S. States, 1970-2006
For individual state and local tax burdens, select from the menu below:
About Tax Burden Data
People
often ask how Tax Foundation rankings of state-local tax burdens
compare to Census data, which include two popular state-by-state
rankings. One of these popular Census tables covers only state-level
taxes (see here).
Local taxes are excluded, such as property taxes and local sales taxes.
This exclusion allows Census to report up-to-date state-level
collections, which would be impossible if required to wait for the
time-consuming tally of tax collections by thousands of local
governments. However, some states accomplish at the local level what
other states accomplish at the state level, so a degree of
comparability is lost as a result. For example, New York's state sales
tax rate is 4 percent, and its counties have local sales tax rates that
range from 3 percent to 5.75 percent. Connecticut, on the other had,
has a 6 percent state-level sales tax with no local add-ons. In a
ranking that includes only state-level taxes, New York appears less
taxed than it actually is, and Connecticut appears more taxed. Census
also ranks combined state-local tax collections after it has amassed
the local data (see here).
This is closer to the Tax Foundation rankings, which take the
additional steps of projecting collections into the current year,
counting out-of-state tax payments in the state of residence instead of
the state of collection, and dividing total tax payments by total
income to calculate the "burden."
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