MuniLand

The Tax Foundation named names in a new report that details the states that have the heaviest tax structures. The report compiled personal and corporate income tax, sales tax, unemployment insurance and property tax rates, and it used this data to rank states by their tax burdens. The Tax Foundation describes the purpose of the effort:

State Business Tax Climate Index enables business leaders, government policymakers, and taxpayers to gauge how their states’ tax systems compare.

Property taxes and unemployment insurance taxes are levied in every state, but there are several states that do without one or more of the major taxes: the corporate tax, the individual income tax, or the sales tax.

I wondered if high taxing states also had high debt loads. In 2011, Moody’s published debt load data by state, and I pulled the numbers for the ten highest-taxing states. You can see the results in the chart above.

State debt loads vary from Iowa’s 0.7% debt as percent of personal income to New Jersey’s 7.9% debt load. High debt load states Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York and California are also on the high tax list, but other states like Iowa and Vermont, with relatively light debt loads, also rank high for taxes. States with low debt loads would have more flexibility and would be better positioned to reduce their budgets if the economy slowed again.

In his New York Times column yesterday, Joe Nocera laid the blame for the fiscal catastrophe in Woonsocket, Rhode Island on Jon Brien, a state legislator who blocked a bill that would have plugged a massive hole in the town’s budget by raising property taxes on its residents by 13.8 percent. Nocera argued that Brien took these actions to shrink the local government because he’s a conservative ideologue, further highlighted by the fact that Brien is also on the national board of ALEC, an advocacy group that pushes for smaller government.

Maybe it’s true that Brien was primarily motivated by ideology, but if Nocera had taken even a cursory glance at the financial statement for Woonsocket, he would see Brien’s position has some merit. Spending on retiree benefits and municipal debt are drowning Woonsocket. The city is in a death spiral.

Let’s start with what Nocera got right: Municipal pensions, the traditional whipping boys for conservative critics of out-of-control government spending, are not Woonsocket’s big problem. The town’s pensions are actually 60 percent-to-90 percent funded, pretty good by Rhode Island standards (page 77). Maintenance of the pension funds required a contribution of only 2.2 percent of the 2011 budget.

Most everyone knows that the Federal Reserve Board is responsible for making monetary policy, handling prudential oversight of many of the nation’s banks and keeping the clearing and payment system flowing. But the Fed has another fundamental function that often goes unnoticed: collecting financial and economic data.

Good policymaking flows from having fresh and accurate data. From my little experience with the Fed they are not doing very well at this task.

Reuters is reporting that Fed Governor Elizabeth Duke believes that household debt has declined since the financial crisis of 2008 and that this reduction in household balance sheets will position families to participate in the recovery when conditions tick up. From Reuters:

A quick and dirty way to evaluate the credit quality of a borrower is to look at his debt load relative to revenues. It’s not a perfect measure — it doesn’t take into account whether that debt is repaid over many years or whether it’s all due at once, for instance — but it suggests why investors view some states as better risks than others. I’ve made a set of charts so we can compare debt loads and revenues for the states in a simple, visual way. The amount of debt load is indicated by the full height of the bar. (Please note the vertical scales of the charts vary. California is the highest borrower by far.)

I’ll do another series of charts that includes pension liabilities and other post-employment benefits, and I’m warning you now: that set will look scary. Here is a link to these data and charts in interactive format. Feel free to embed and use them elsewhere (crediting Reuters of course).

Tax collection data is from the U.S. Census Bureau and debt load data is from Standard and Poor’s.