What Caused Recent Tax Increases at the State Level?

The recent recession cut deeply into state treasuries, forcing legislatures to raise taxes or cut spending or both to eliminate budget deficits. It is interesting to note which states opted for big tax hikes over big spending cuts. USNews Money blogger Rick Newman has compiled a list of the 10 states with the largest enacted and “proposed” tax increases per capita over the 2009-2011 years, based on figures from the Association of State Budget Officers.

Almost all the states on the list either had unified Democratic control for most of the period of analysis (New York, Delaware, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, New Hampshire) or are ideologically liberal (Connecticut, California). Arizona is one of two exceptions; they had a particularly large real estate bust. Kansas I can’t explain – but they only show up because of “proposed” increases. I will go out on a limb and predict that most of those increases will never be enacted.

By the way, the two-thirds requirement for raising taxes in California, which effectively gives veto power to moderate Republicans, does not seem to have had the ill consequences attributed to it – California is #2 on the list.