The States That Rob You the Most (and the Least)

This article on Yahoo Finance is hardly a surprise, but it is worth a mention here. The article lists the ten states with the highest tax burdens and the ten states with the lowest tax burdens. The highest tax states are predictable – if you follow this stuff at all, you’ll get at least 7 out of 10 correct.

In the order of bad to worse: Pennsylvania, Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, California, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. See any geographical uniformities here? Such as the liberal, Yankee northeast and the east coast, with a sprinkling of very leftish midwestern states? The 10 least criminal states are also not a surprise. Here’s the order from lower taxes to lowest: New Mexico, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, Wyoming, Tennessee, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska. The lone Yankee state is not really Yankee by heritage – it has become the Free State. Most of these states rank among those states with the highest rate of population growth in recent years.

So yes, not only do people go to live in places where they can keep more of their money, but, more importantly, businesses gravitate to low-cost, low-tax, less bureaucratic states, and with that goes a whole host of intellectual capital looking for good jobs and more money they can keep.