On average, North Carolinians had the 14th-highest amount of tax increases per capita among all states during the past seven years, Americans for Tax Reform says in its recently released annual Cost of Government Day report.
Americans for Tax Reform said North Carolina raised its taxes by $5.9 billion during that time, the second highest increase among states in the Southeast, behind Tennessee.
The Washington-based taxpayer protection group calculates the price tag for federal, state, and local government to individual taxpayers every year, and ranks the costs per capita for each state. Americans for Tax Reform then computes how many days out of the year it requires for the average taxpayer to pay for his or her share of government spending. The group said this year average Americans finished paying their government tabs July 11, two days more than was required in 2006.
“Right now taxpayers are under attack from Congress,” said Grover Norquist, the organization’s president, in a press release. “With tax increases on everything from cigarettes to private equity on the table, this year’s Cost of Government Day must spur politicians into action to protect taxpayers and the economic growth achieved under President Bush’s tax cuts.”
For North Carolina taxpayers, Cost of Government Day came earlier than the national average: July 6. That placed it 27th among the 50 states. Alabama and Oklahoma tied for the earliest calendar date, June 22, for their taxpayers to pay off their overall government expenditures. Connecticut by far had the latest date in Americans for Tax Reform’s rankings, with a date of Aug. 2.
“The burden in Connecticut is so onerous,” the report said, “both because it has very high relative incomes, getting a big hit from the federal income tax, and because it has high state and local taxes.”
But the organization also reviewed state tax increases over the past seven years, and found that the average N.C. resident paid $668 more because of those increases since fiscal 2002. Overall, New Jersey by far had the largest tax increase during that time period, at $2,602 per capita.
Among the Cost of Government Day rankings, North Carolina landed the third-latest of states in the Southeast, just ahead of Virginia, July 11, and Florida, July 13.
“Average North Carolina residents must work 187 days out of the year to pay for the cost of government spending and regulations,” Norquist said. “That is days later than all of its neighbors besides Virginia. As North Carolina has raised taxes by nearly $6 billion from FY 2002-2008, taxpayers should contact their legislators and tell them that 187 days worked for government is enough.”
In contrast Rob Schofield, of the liberal public policy organization N.C. Policy Watch, wrote in January that the state’s tax increases this decade were a relative bargain.
“…During a decade in which North Carolina was forced to grapple with skyrocketing growth in the cost of health care, a massive influx of school age children, an exploding prison population, and repeated federal cost shifts in which Congress dumped responsibility for essential services onto state government, state leaders managed to keep most basic state services alive and kicking for an extra 300 bucks per person — or about 82 cents a day,” he wrote for the group’s Web site.
Paul Chesser ([email protected]) is associate editor of Carolina Journal.