Hmm, I don't quite understand this methodology. This site lists my state, Massachusetts, as having a 3.29% individual income tax burden, but our income tax rate is a flat 5% (no brackets). I'm looking at the exemption list (https://www.mass.gov/service-details/view-massachusetts-pers...) and I can't see how it could possibly make that big of a difference.

The dependent exemption and old age exemptions definitely look like they could knock out 1.5% of income. If you have an income of 70k and two dependents, you would have an effective tax rate of 2.14%.

can you clarify how you got that result?

70,000 - 8800 (married filing jointly) - 2000 (two dependents) = $59200 taxable income, $2960 tax bill. An effective rate of 4.22%

To reach the site's stated 3.29%, this family would need to make around 32k a year.

Fwiw, it appears the average household income in Massachusetts is about 80k.

Always brought up and a bit of a red herring. Averaged out, yes. But prop 13 gives older generations are far lower tax burden. If you’re a young home owner in California, it’s absolutely the highest tax burden in the country.

It's not a red herring. If I think my taxes are too high, and I hear "California has the highest taxes in the country!", I will think, "Oh, California should spend less money so my taxes go down." But if I hear "California has extremely high taxes for people like me, but very low taxes for certain other rich people," I will think, "California should reform its tax policies so that it gets more money from those people and less from me."

Superlatives are weird. You can claim California has the highest tax rate and it could actually just be average, because you aren’t technically comparing against anything. If the commenter said “California has the highest tax rate compared to any other state”, the statement would be false, but leaving out the comparison makes it true by default.

Of course, that’s just advertising law (what you can legally claim about your product), this is an online forum based on higher standards.

Why would you take anyone seriously where the first thing to come out their mouth is a lie?

Words matters. Their context matters.

You are confusing rate and burden. The top burden is different from the top rate-- tax burden is a function of income and demographics.

I'm not confusing them, but highest tax rate is a useless statistic. Quoting it is thus usually used to push and agenda, not to understand and explain a complex situation.

You could equally be accused of pushing an agenda by quoting an average to refute the max without any further context. Both numbers are misleading.

How is “Tax Burden” calculated? How is “personal income” determined? This is opaque and essentially meaningless. It remains true that California has the highest tax rate in the country.

It says it in the link: "property taxes, individual income taxes and sales and excise taxes — as a share of total personal income in the state."

As for personal income, you declare it every year on your tax form.

If that’s the case then something is wrong with their data. They say that 3.78% is the individual income tax “burden” on personal income in California and that is just not true unless they are doing some sort of average across the population. The income tax rate in California can be as high as ~13%

> They say that 3.78% is the individual income tax “burden” on personal income in California and that is just not true unless they are doing some sort of average across the population.

Why do so many people not understand how graduated income taxes work? And why wouldn’t you average the tax burden across the entire California population when calculating its “tax rate”, unless you are claiming the highest tax rate in California someone could actually pay rather than the rates paid on average?

One camp is referencing the max. The other camp is referencing the average. The max does not refute the average and vice versa therefore both are misleading. A distribution would be more clear.

If one means to say highest maximum tax rate, just say it. No weasel interpretations.

But I guess these are the same people that don’t understand how America dealt with a 90% income tax rate in the 1950s. Or a 77% tax rate until 1981!

> If one means to say highest maximum tax rate, just say it. No weasel interpretations.

To be fair, when people criticize the tax rate, be it state or federal, it is usually implied they are referencing the highest tax rate. Apples to apples, it’s a rough but fairly accurate proxy for relative so called “tax burden.” One would expect states with roughly equivalent highest tax rates to scale their tax rates about the same as income goes down.

> One would expect states with roughly equivalent highest tax rates to scale their tax rates about the same as income goes down.

That is incredibly stupid. Someone (single) in Alabama making $40k/year is paying 4.07% effective state income tax rate, in California they are just paying 2.37%. States with lower top tax rates are usually more regressive than states with higher top tax rates, red southern states being the main example of states with regressive taxation.

> That is incredibly stupid. Someone (single) in Alabama making $40k/year is paying 4.07% effective state income tax rate, in California they are just paying 2.37%.

This actually validates my point. 40K in Alabama goes a lot farther than 40K in California, based on differences in average cost of living. Just look at relative gas prices. Why are you so hostile? You shouldn’t bully fellow commenters on HN.

That wasn’t the argument being made. The one stated that higher top tax rates mean higher low tax rates as well is false, the converse is true.

Alabama is nearly last in everything for a good reason. That Californians have a much longer life expectancy (with correspondingly lower obesity rates and fewer health problems) shows that there is more to measuring COL than just what people can buy.

I only pointed out that the assumption that higher top tax rates meant higher bottom tax rates as well is incredibly stupid, if anything, the converse is true (higher top tax rates usually mean lower bottom tax rates, not higher).

> The one stated that higher top tax rates mean higher low tax rates as well is false

That actually wasn’t the argument being made. Which I think is why you keep validating my point. You can reread what I wrote to verify.

The top rate 12.3% only applies to income in excess of $600k for single and $1.2m for married. How is quoting this rate at all relevant for average people?

https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2020/2020-California-Tax-Rate-S...