What If Taxpayers Could Choose if Taxes Went to the State Level or Federal Level?

mises.org / Ryan McMaken / June 16, 2017

In recent years, we’ve examined any number of ways of decentralizing the American political system. These step-by-step moves can include decentralizing the monetary system, decentralizing the military, decentralizing immigration policy, and decentralizing elections.

Most recently, we looked at decentralizing the welfare state, and found that each US state is more than wealthy enough and big enough to run its own welfare state at the state level without any need of planning or centralization through Washington, DC. Whether or not one thinks a welfare state is a good or necessary thing, the fact remains the US government is not an essential part of the equation.

One piece of information that stood out the state-level analysis of tax revenue: the amount of taxes collected by the federal government far outpaces that collected at the state level. Nationwide, state-level tax bills are 28 percent the size of the federal tax bill. In a midsize state like Georgia, for example, residents pay 21 billion in taxes to the state government. However, those same residents pay a total of 86 billion to the federal government. The federal tax bill for Georgians is more than four times the size of the state tax bill.1

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