[minikites]

It would be interesting to add a column of average income tax rates. At a glance, it seems like higher tax states tend to have more innovation, but that could just be my own bias.

(Correlation isn't sufficient to show causation, but it would show that taxes don't have a negative effect on innovation as many anti-tax proponents would argue.)

[Steltek]

MA doesn't really have a high income tax. It's half of CA's and less than a lot of red states (AR, MO, TN). It's going to drop to 5.1% or 5.0% or something soon as well (I think?).

http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/...

[oldmanjay]

If could also show that where innovation has led to exploding revenue, politicians decided to take a bigger cut. The trouble is, with no way to isolate the effects, you can only make religious statements about the causes. People who want more state control will see taxes as a good, as they do given any set of facts.

[TulliusCicero]

California and Mass. have been blue, high tax states for decades. If high taxes were as destructive to entrepreneurship and innovation as low-tax proponents usually claim, one would expect that these two states would be in the economic dumps. Instead, the opposite is true.

[minikites]

An influential sect of economics is unashamedly founded on beliefs instead of empiricism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology

[sammydavis]

Washington state is the easy counter case for high tax states. No state income tax, 10% sales tax. Doing about as well as these states. In fact, you are prohibited from moving here. And there's a constant complaint that we are overtaxed and that adding income taxes would destroy the state (just like Mass. and Ca. have been destroyed).