State Taxes Are Wildly Regressive

Some indigestible food for thought:  there is not a single state in the Union—not one—in which the top 1% of income earners pay a higher rate of state taxes than the bottom 20%.  For the majority of states, it’s not even close:  the poorest 20% pay somewhere between double and six times the tax rate of the richest 1%.  In Florida, those who make the least pay 13.5% of their income in state taxes, while those who make the most pay 2.1%.

This comes to us from Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, who dug into the comprehensive “Assets and Opportunity Scorecard” recently produced by the The Corporation for Enterprise Development.