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Show Utah Ranks 12th In Income Goinq For State, Local Taxes During the 1980 fiscal year, Utah ranked 12th among the 50 states in the proportion of personal per-sonal income going for state and local taxes. This fact was reported by Utah Foundation, the private tax research organization, orga-nization, in a comparative study of Utah's tax burden. ACCORDING to the report, state and local units in Utah collected $1,227 million in mes during the 1980 fiscal year. This was equal to I. .30 nercent of total personal income in-come during the preceding Xdaryear.Thispercenmg was well above the U.S. aver age of 11.52 percent the ihe Mountain States average of li' 12.03 percent. The study notes, however thai personal income actually measures the economic well. m being of the residents of a I state, and does not necessarily reflect the taxing capacity of the governmental unit. A state I may receive considerable re-venue re-venue from taxes levied against out-of-state residents, f such as tourists, as well as f taxes imposed on the value of r extracted natural resources. 5 DURING RECENT years, taxes on tourism and natural resources have played an in- creasingly important role in It the revenue structures of some " state governments. Some of these states, of course, are states with vast oil and gas re- ( sources. As a result, they have V a total taxing capacity consid-erably consid-erably above that of most I other states. Similarly. Neva- l da with its broad appeal to out- C of-state tourists also ranks g very high in taxing capacity, j The total taxing capacity in L Utah, on the other hand, is 9 percent below the U.S. aver- k age. In other words, the same tax rates in Utah will produce about 9 percent less revenue per capita than they would in the nation as a whole. Thus. 1 Utah must impose higher taxes F-in F-in order to receive the same revenue per capita obtained in 1 a more representative stale.' 'p- FOUNDATION analysts in- dicate that another factor thai I . compounds financing prob- lems in Utah is that it has such l"" a high percentage of its popula- f-tion f-tion in the nonproductive age i brackets. According to the I 1980 Census of Population. 49 'ps, percent of Utah's population is I in the under 20 and the 65 and is, over age brackets. Nationally. I only 43 percent of the popula- j tion is in these nonproductive I age groups. f Because Utah has one of ihe highest ratios of school age children to adult population among the 50 states, it musl spend a disproponinately high percentage of its total budget for educational services. During Dur-ing the 1980 fiscal year, fores- ample, education accounted for 46 percent of Utah's total state and local expenditures. For the nation as a w hole, only 36 percent of all state and local spending went for education. |
