Rhode Island is abyssmal at 48th, and as usual ranks near or at the bottom of all important rankings. It’s really depressing when you see it year after year, bad news after bad about your state - I have to move.
This is a local site, not necessary for response to the above, that collected data from other sites into one place, with links to the data to see other states rankings in the series of polls:
After taking a look at their methodology, I’m not sure that study is worth the electrons it’s printed on. Especially because they don’t even try to analyze the quality of the services provided by each state. But consider that they use one value for median house prices across the entire US rather than the (admittedly not much better) median house price within a state. I think they’re wildly understating the property taxes you’d pay in California and Massachusetts.
I haven’t checked according to that particular metric but David Sirota recently called my state out for having THE most-regressive tax structure in the COUNTRY (I could scarcely believe it). Coupled with how poorly my state funds higher education - well, I won’t say I wanna MOVE 'cause I’ve lived here most of my life and I love the state I live in, but finding those things out was VERY disappointing to me, to say the least.
California property taxes are tricky to figure. Because of Proposition 13, two houses with identical current values can have wildly different property tax assessments, depending on how long the current owners have been living there.
For me, my property taxes are quite low – I’ve been living in my house almost 20 years. I know my neighbors in very similar houses pay much more.
Maryland does have pretty high income tax, and they’re not kind to retirees in that regard. On the other hand, our county does an amazing job of keeping the roads clear when it snows, and they’re pretty good at prompt road repair, so at least that part of my taxes are well-spent.
In any case, I’m not moving. I like where I live and I’ll budget accordingly. There’s more to life than what you pay in taxes.
This concept that the only good tax is a dead tax is simply bullshit. There are an awful lot of other considerations that come into play with taxes, for example quality of government and infrastructure.
Our best asset is the short distance to another state.
Here’s how I described the state in a post long ago:
I live in Cumberland Rhode Island. We are seperated from the mainland by a sea of ignorance. Nothing much happens here at all. We go shopping at a mall called Massachusetts. The retirement system for former mayors and governors is a minimum security factility in Connecticut.
