North Dakota Ranks 6th In Nation For Corporate Income Tax Collections
George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has an interesting study out about taxes in the various states, and they’ve produced some revealing maps to go along with it.
Like the one above, which shows North Dakota as having the sixth highest per-capita corporate income tax collections in the nation, coming in right behind California. That is going to be surprising to a lot of people (it was surprising to me) given how often North Dakota is sold as a “business friendly” state. It turns out, North Dakota has relatively high taxes on businesses.
In terms of the personal income tax, North Dakota comes in at about the middle of the pack:
Compare the corporate income tax to the property tax, which gets much more attention in the state politically than any other tax. The property tax has been a hot button issue in the state for the better part of a decade now, but according to Mercatus North Dakota has among the lowest per-capita property tax burdens in the nation:
Meanwhile, the state has one of the highest per-capita rates of sales tax revenues per capita, coming in fourth behind Wyoming, Washington and Hawaii:
There are some distorting factors here. The fact that North Dakota is very much a rural, agrarian state is probably diluting the property tax number, and the oil boom has caused sales tax revenues to skyrocket no doubt pushing the state’s ranking on that front higher than it would be otherwise.
Still, many in the state argue that tax reforms should be focused on the income tax instead of the property tax. And these numbers seem to back that argument up.
Update: I think I sort of burie the lede on this study. Take out this chart showing total per-capita tax collections. North Dakota is second in the nation:
