The latest consequence of the previous governor’s and Legislature’s tax-happiness comes from Kiplinger’s Retiree Tax Heavens (and Hells).

Even had you not seen this on the news, given Kiplinger’s headline, you probably could choose one and have nearly a 100 percent chance of being right.

Wisconsin is one of the 10 worst states for retirees, according to Kiplinger. The other nine are California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon and Vermont. (Which gives the lie, at least in those states, to the claims of the outsize political influence of senior citizens.)

The list of 10 best states for retirees actually does not include many states where one would think elderly people are moving in huge gray waves for retirement — Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wyoming. (Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Texas are not on the list.)

Wisconsin’s approach to taxing retirement income is similar to the federal government’s, according to Kiplinger. While Social Security and Railroad Retirement income is not taxable, and “all retirement payments from the U.S. military employee retirement system, the Coast Guard, the commissioned corps of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Public Health Service” are exempt from taxes, most other retirement income is taxable at up to 7.75 percent.

(An intriguing half-sentence on this page: “Certain Wisconsin state- and local-government retirees qualify for a tax exemption …” One wonders how those who paid the salaries of state and local government retirees who do not get that tax exemption feel about that.)

Wisconsin probably ranks closer to 41st than 50th given that the state did not make the lists of the five states with the top income tax brackets, highest sales taxes or highest median real estate taxes, or the six least pension-friendly states, or the 23 states with estate or inheritance taxes. On the other hand, Wisconsin also did not make any of the opposite lists, and Wisconsin’s lack of estate and inheritance taxes is the case only until the end of 2012.

If your goal is merely to maximize revenue from taxpayers, being on Kiplinger’s bottom 10 list makes sense. Despite what you read from demagogic Democrats about failure to tax enough resulting in senior citizens’ living on the street and eating cat food, the fact is that the retirement generation as a generation is the richest in this country. They’ve had their entire working lives to invest income and accumulate wealth, they’ve paid off most of the big bills (their homes, children’s college, etc.), and the past three years of stock market doldrums took money from a vastly larger base of investments thanks to the economy of the 1980s and 1990s.

What is particularly unfair about high retirement taxes is that many retired people feel unable to leave Wisconsin because Wisconsin is where their family is. (Particularly in the case of retired people with grandchildren, and particularly where their children are single parents.) The nature of retirement is much different from the days of retirees’ parents; retirees from the full-time grind can usually expect enough years of good post-retirement health to make such contributions as starting a business or getting heavily involved in volunteer work. Encouraging retirees to leave, which our tax structure clearly does, means those contributions go to another state too.

As is always the case, when you want less of something, you tax it.