State Taxes and the Tax Debate

Jared Bernstein on State Taxes and the Tax Debate.

"You don’t win friends doing it, but I’ve been trying to amplify the point that if you look at federal taxation from any angle you want, you will be very hard pressed to make an argument that Americans are overtaxed.  Relative to our own past, to other advanced nations, to the optimal taxation literature…that argument is simply not in the data. But what about state and local taxes?  Have they gone up enough to offset the decline in federal taxation since 2000?"

"In fact, once you add state+local+federal together, you find that the share of total taxes paid by households is pretty close to their share of national income, a strong data point against argument that the bottom 50% don’t have any skin in the tax game. That’s only true if you’re considering federal income taxes."