Fausta's blog

Faustam fortuna adiuvat
The official blog of Fausta's Blog Talk Radio show.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

What's the matter with New Jersey?,

asks The Wall Street Journal (by subscription; emphasis added)
The idea of financing state services without an income tax is hardly radical. Nine states today - Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennesse, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming - manage well without them. With a few exceptions, the non-income tax states are America's most prosperous. Meanwhile, the high income states, which tend to be congregated in the North East, keep surrendering jobs, people, and voters to the South and West.

State lawmakers also seem to have learned from two of the most recent states to adopt an income tax: New Jersey and Connecticut. As recently as 1965 New Jersey had neither an income nor sales tax, but managed to balance the budget every year. Now it has both taxes - its income tax is the 5th highest in the nation -
And let's not even think of the highest property taxes and school taxes, too,
but the state is facing what Stateline.org calls a "staggering budget deficit." Allied Van Lines reports that the Garden State is one of the leading places for people to flee.
I first started this blog out of frustration with NJ taxes. While my frustration hasn't diminished, I've become so fed up of the subject that I'm posting about it because The Husband asked that I do.

The National Center for Policy Analysis has more on the "ferocious competition to attract jobs and businesses" among the states.

New Jersey is entirely out of the competition.

Update In the comments section, Francis Porretto recommends Robert Higgs's excellent book, Crisis and Leviathan

I read this book several years ago and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in fiscal policy, economics, or how their hard-earned money is spent by the politicians.

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3 Comments:

At 4:19 PM, Blogger Webmistress of the Dark said...

Yes isn't it interesting? New taxes never make up for old ones, they just create more spending and yes, more taxes.

Look up the two studies "A River Divides It" (AIM Institute) and "Fifteen Years of Folly" (Yankee Institute) for proof that this is true.

 
At 4:46 PM, Blogger Fausta said...

I will look up both studies, WMOTD, thanks!

 
At 5:28 PM, Blogger Francis W. Porretto said...

The history of taxation and government growth suggests that the only way to get and keep a balanaced public budget is to keep government starved of revenue and down to a tiny list of truly indispensable functions. Before the income tax, our federal government ran annual budget surpluses that it couldn't find a way to spend. Robert Higgs's book Crisis and Leviathan is most instructive on this subject.

 

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