| Abstract |
"In early 2012, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial: The Heartland Tax Rebellion, which brought to national attention the movement in many Midwestern states to replace their state income tax. The opinion piece compared nine states with the highest personal income tax with nine states with no income tax. In each category (population, state product and employment) no-income tax states came out ahead, while high- and low-income tax states lagged behind. The debate continued in 2013, when Travis Brown's groundbreaking book How Money Walks proved conclusively for the first time what many folks, including some of the country's most famed economists, have long suspected: Americans are moving away from high-tax states and into low- and no-income tax states at alarming rates; and pro-growth policy at the state level is creating the winners, while big-government, tax-and-spend policies at the state level are creating the losers. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of States is a more detailed and critical look at income taxation across the 50 states, and drills down on the economic growth or malaise that results from state-level taxation polices. In short, the authors conclude you can't tax a state into prosperity, nor can a poor person spend himself into wealth. If you tax rich people and give the money to poor people, sooner or later you'll have lots and lots of poor people and no rich people. Based on their detail and quantitative analysis, the authors argue passionately for tax reform and no income taxes, and that government taxation policies truly matter when it comes to building economic growth and long-term prosperity. The variables that matter: the state's highest personal income tax rate, the progressivity of the personal income tax, i.e. how rapidly tax rates rise in relation to income, the state's highest corporate income tax rate, is the state a right-to-work state?, the static revenue legislated tax changes over the past two years as a percentage of personal income, is there a death or estate tax?, workers' compensation cost as a percentage of total payrolls, the state's minimum wage, business friendliness of the state's tort liability system, as measured by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's State Liability Systems Survey Index, the state's sales tax burden as a percent of personal income, the state's property tax burden as a percent of personal income, the burden of total other taxes, which include taxes such as motor fuel, alcoholic beverages, tobacco taxes, public utilities taxes, motor vehicle license taxes, etc., as a percentage of personal income, number of state and local public employees per 10,000 population, and more... "-- Provided by publisher. |
