Marple’s Pacific Northwest Letter occasionally drops one of its little gems in the Laquedem mailbox. The current issue (May 26, No. 1413, not, alas, available online) includes a fascinating table with statistics for six western states (California, Idaho, Washington, Montana, Oregon, and Alaska) and the United States, including state-level taxes per capita and as a percentage of income, and state and local employees per 10,000 population for 1990 and 2001.
State government has an efficiency of scale: the United States average number of state employees per 10,000 population is about 150. California holds down one end of the scale at 108 state employees per 10,000 population, Alaska (377) and Montana (214), the two least populous of the six states, are at the other end, and Washington (186), Idaho (176), and Oregon (156) are in between.
Oregon’s state government shrank the most relative to population, going from 184/10,000 in 1990 to 156/10,000 in 2001. A lot of this is because Oregon’s population grew, and the state government didn’t grow to match. But some must be from efficiency in government, or some services just plain going away: in 1990 Oregon and Washington had almost the same number of state employees per 10,000 (184 and 187), but in 2001 Oregon was more efficient by far (156 in Oregon, 186 in Washington). As Washington has nearly twice the population of Oregon, Washington’s state government should have fewer employees per 10,000 than Oregon’s — instead it has 20% more.
The Marple’s article contained one more interesting statistic: for every $100 that individuals in Oregon paid in income taxes in 2003, corporations paid only $5.60.
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Regarding your last bit of information, that for every $100 Oregonians paid in income tax, corporations paid $5.60 – do you know how this compares to Federal tax paid by individuals and corporations? How about the Canadians – whose government I always consider to be kinder and gentler (Although I know not a whit about the Canadian government) – do you know how their individual and corporate tax compares? I am thinking that the individual, in America, is considered a disposable resource.
Good question! In 2002, the federal government collected about $1 trillion from the personal income tax and about $211 billion from the corporate income tax. The government also collected about $750 billion from other taxes, mostly employment taxes. Counting income tax collections only, for every $100 the federal government collected from individuals, it collected $21 from corporations.
How does this compare to Canada, Norway …Andora? Is it different with GWB than with Clinton, Reagan or Jimmy Carter (my hero, by the way). Or is this the price tag of our individual freedom (or the price tag of the individual) ? Something, besides my grammar, really stinks.