Heh, I remember the first time I went to Jantzen Beach. For you non-Portland-metro-area folks, it’s the first exit on Interstate 5 after you cross the state line from Washington (roughly 9% sales tax, more or less depending on the county) into Oregon (0% sales tax). Well over 90% of the cars in the parking lot have Washington license plates.
Weirdly, Washington does not assess sales tax to residents of Oregon, Alaska, or Delaware on the purchase of goods. They have to pay it on services, but not goods. So I could drive into Vancouver, WA, and buy a television or diamond jewelry or whatnot and pay no sales tax. But my friends who actually live there would have to pay the tax on the same item purchased at the same store. I guess they’re trying to help retailers near the Oregon border so that Oregonians will shop there… but those retailers are losing WAY more business due to WA residents shopping in OR than they are gaining from OR residents shopping in WA.
And there’s so many more things to consider than just income/sales/property tax. Excise tax on the sale of property. Estate tax and inheritance tax. Toll roads/bridges/tunnels. Gas tax. Other payroll taxes. Taxes on specific items like alcohol or cigarettes or hotel rooms or plane tickets or telephone lines or utilities. Cost of parking tickets and moving violations and the extent to which they’re policing in order to gain revenue from the fines. Drivers license & vehicle registration and inspection fees. Dog / fishing / hunting/ concealed carry licenses. Whether or not food is taxed. How much your hairdresser has to pay to get their license (a portion of which is passed on to you) and how onerous the licensing requirements are. Premium tax on your insurance policies.
A few years back Ohio’s state legislature did away with their estate tax (announced before but effective right after my stepdad died ). An easy move for them because nearly all of the revenue was passed back to the cities. So then the cities, especially the ones in higher COL areas (with lots of rich old people), lost a massive revenue stream and most had to substantially increase their income taxes as a result.
Taxes on gasoline and alcohol vary tremendously from one state to the next. When I moved from Ohio to Washington my vehicle registration went from like $32 a year to around $450 a year.
Not big money, but when I started working in Oregon I couldn’t figure out why I’d get like 10 paychecks in a row for one amount and then I’d get one paycheck that would be like 8 or 40 cents higher and then back to the previous amount for a bunch more paychecks. Weird, right???
Turns out that there’s a special payroll tax of 8 cents per employee per day… but it’s only assessed the days employees are actually working. So if there was a holiday in the pay period then my paycheck would go up 8 cents, or if I’d taken a week of vacation it would go up 40 cents because I didn’t have to pay that stupid 8 cent tax for the days I wasn’t working. I don’t know if it’s still 8 cents, but it was for a while. Portland also assessed a flat $35 tax to resident to fund arts organizations.
I can’t imagine if we bring transfer tax into this equation. In Philly I pay 4% of gross income to the city, then I pay state tax which is low 3.7% (but also not reduced for 401k contributions). When I bought my house I was surprised to find out about a 4% tax on the sale price (split between buyer and seller). Then I pay a couple grand on property tax. Plus a small amount on parking tickets and tolls. Let’s not forget sales tax, gas tax and sugar tax. Plus which services are covered vs billed separately. E.g. water, sewage, storm water, and waste collection.
Municipalities and state’s need to tax, but it gets hard to make any reasonable comparison of how much you’ll pay at different locations. And what value you really get from that tax. Quoting property tax purely as a percent for example is very confusing because it can be applied to land or improved value or both. Plus tax appraised value is often but not always lower than actual. All these things make comparing rates across states or even municipalities almost impossible. The only reasonable way to look at it is a total tax burden.
It isn’t a 5.69% sales tax rate. That analysis is tax “burden”. I haven’t looked that closely but their basic explanation makes it seem like they calculate average per capita tax paid and average per capita personal income (all in $s) to determine the per capita tax burden rate.
That’s insane. We paid around $1000/month in property tax and our house was worth over 1.1m (sold later for much higher but we got lucky). I don’t think any difference in sales tax can make up for that differential.
And we don’t have income tax (at risk of outing where I live now but whatever).
yeah, and if ours is 10%, we’d each need to buy 30k in goods each month to break even the property tax difference (assuming I had the same house where you live, so I’d be paying 2000/month in property tax). More if you want to account for income tax difference.
For real, I was looking at Chicago condo comps because some looked cute, and then I saw the property tax estimate and was like, that’s a whole other mortgage payment.
My house is 550K and I pay 13.5k a year in taxes in NJ. The town/borough only has garbage pickup one day a week. They use over 60% of the funds for public school education.
Which doesn’t help me so much because I send my four kids to private school. The only thing that disappoints me is that they allocate very little to bus transportation so we have to pay a lot extra for bussing and do a lot of carpooling which is problematic.
See that’s just insane. And I don’t find NJ to be that appealing. Other than people filling your gas for you. 13.5k in taxes was more than what we paid for our 1.1m house here in the PNW. $1000 a month in increasing (most likely) perpetuity is scarier than a bad HOA.
). An easy move for them because nearly all of the revenue was passed back to the cities. So then the cities, especially the ones in higher COL areas (with lots of rich old people), lost a massive revenue stream and most had to substantially increase their income taxes as a result.