We had an interesting comment recently on our Financial State of the States methodology. The reader questioned why we chose to use the number of individual income taxpayers, rather than a broader measure of taxable resources, like GDP, for the denominator in our “Taxpayer Burden” measure.
He argued our method probably leads to a bias in our results in favor of ‘thinly populated Western states,’ and recommended using state GDP for the denominator.
The chart below compares the rankings of the 50 states based on our “Taxpayer Burden” (with the number of taxpayers in the denominator), to the rankings of the 50 states based on what he recommended.
Looks pretty close.
We value reader input and questions on our work.