Connecticut had the third-highest tax burden in the country in 2011, according to a report released Wednesday by the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based policy research organization.
Residents paid 11.9 percent of their per capita income to state and local taxes in 2011, the report said. Finishing first and second were New York and New Jersey, which paid 12.6 percent and 12.3 percent, respectively.
Those three states have occupied the top three spots on the Tax Foundation”™s annual list since 2005.
“The residents of three states stand above the rest: New York, New Jersey and Connecticut,” authors Elizabeth Malm and Gerald Prante wrote in the report. “These are the only states where taxpayers forego over 11.9 percent of their income in state-local taxes, one half of a percentage point above the next highest state, California.”
The report defined the tax burden based on what residents pay in local and state taxes, not what is collected by state taxing entities. In other words, if a Connecticut resident works in New York City and pays a city income tax, that tax was counted as part of Connecticut residents”™ tax burden, not as part of New York state”™s.
Connecticut had the highest income per capita of any nation in the state, with $60,287. Residents paid $4,885 per captia to Connecticut and $2,017 per capita to other states. Although it ranked below New York and New Jersey, the state”™s total state and local tax burden per capita, $7,150, was the largest of any state in the country, and about $500 larger than New York and New Jersey.
Wyoming residents had the smallest burden according to the report, paying 6,9 percent of income in 2011. It was the first time a state other than Alaska ranked as least taxed in several decades worth of reports, the Tax Foundation said.
