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The Tax Foundation’s special report out this week is another verification of what New Yorkers already sense: Our state and local tax burden is the highest in the nation. The foundation looked at data on all 50 states and the Columbia District. It found that New York had the highest tax burden of any of them. The foundation estimated the state and local tax burden for New Yorkers in 2004 at 12.9% of income. The nationwide average was 10%,and in Alaska, the state with the lowest state and local tax burden on its residents, the tax burden was a mere 6.3%.
What does that mean, practically? The Tax Foundation translates the tax burden into days spent working to pay taxes. New Yorkers, according to the study, spent 46 days of the year working just to pay their state and local taxes. If they lived in a state with a lower tax burden, they’d spend fewer days working to support their state and local governments. In, say, Massachusetts, which, despite its old Taxachusetts moniker, has made progress over the years in reducing its tax burden, residents spent only 34 days working to pay state and local taxes.
If you add in federal taxes, New Yorkers spend 117 days of the year working to pay taxes, according to the Tax Foundation. The date of the year that the foundation calls “Tax Freedom Day” — when you stop working to pay taxes and start earning money for yourself — falls on April 27 in New York, but weeks earlier in lower-tax states.
The Tax Foundation study comes on the heels of a study by the Citizens Budget Commission, which also found that New York has the highest state and local tax burden in the nation. New Yorkers have a variety of responses to this. Some dispute the statistics or criticize the messenger or make excuses about why we need higher taxes because circumstances here are somehow different from anywhere else.
Still, in our view, after years of Republican leadership both at the mayoral level of the largest city in the state and in the governor’s mansion at Albany, it’s a sign of failure that New York’s ranking in these sorts of surveys is where it is.
Surely, part of the problem is that New York lacks laws providing for the statewide ballot initiatives that have allowed voters in other states to rein in excessive taxes. How about setting as a goal that New York’s state and local tax burden would not be the highest in the nation, but the lowest? Or even somewhere in the middle.
