The national Tax Foundation published its annual review of state/local taxes. Here’s the PDF of the report. And here’s the press release. TF uses a different methodology for calculating tax burdens than that used by some other familiar sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau. Here’s how TF describes it:

For each state, we calculate the total amount paid by the residents in taxes, then divide those taxes by the state’s total income to compute a “tax burden.” We make this calculation not only for the most recent year but also for earlier years because tax and income data are revised periodically by government agencies.

The goal is to focus not on the tax collectors but on the taxpayers. That is, we answer the question: What percentage of their income are the residents of this state paying in state and local taxes? We are not trying to answer the question: How much money have state and local governments collected? The Census Bureau publishes the definitive comparative data answering that question.

This year, Washington comes in 29th on the TF rankings.

Taxpayers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut bore the highest state-local burdens in the country, while residents in South Dakota, Nevada and Alaska experienced the lowest.

Not much change in our burden or ranking on this scale in recent years (note that the most recent report takes us just to 2009). The TF study is one element in understanding our state’s tax system. It does not account for distribution of the tax burden among classes of taxpayer. More on all this later.