This is a nice followup to this morning’s post about why tax and spending limits need to be in the state Constitution.

WalletHub reports the 10 states (plus the District of Columbia) with the lowest per-person state and local taxes, and the 10 states with the highest state and local taxes.

And where is Wisconsin?

46

Wisconsin

$8975

29%

39

Number 46 from the bottom in terms of total taxes ($8,975), and number 39 in “adjusted rank (based on Cost of Living Index).” Put another way, Wisconsin has either the sixth or 13th highest taxes in the U.S.

The map that accompanies this news …

… does not demonstrate the dominant university’s athletic team colors, a preference for a color of peppers, or anything else besides the fact that Wisconsin remains a tax hell. Nearly the worst in the Midwest, in fact, exceeded only by Illinois and Nebraska if you consider Nebraska to be in the Midwest.

I suppose some would argue we should feel better about the 39th ranking given that we supposedly have a lower cost of living than other states. (Based on this year’s electric and heating bills, that’s incorrect anyway.) More importantly, though, the states in the worse levels of tax hell — New York, California, Nebraska, Connecticut and Illinois — are states with, except possibly Nebraska, higher incomes than Wisconsin. So Wisconsinites have less money with which to pay Govzilla every April 15.

WalletHub has additional bad news:

Economic mobility – that is, our ability to climb the proverbial ladder – has a strong correlation to where we live.  Children from Seattle whose families are in the 25th percentile in terms of income, for example, end up at roughly the same economic stature as kids from the median family in Atlanta.

Why?  State and local taxes.  At least that’s what a group of Harvard and Berkeley researchers collaborating on The Equality of Opportunity Project have to say.  They “found a significant correlation between both measures of mobility and local tax rates.”

That means, if you buy their conclusions, that Wisconsinites are prevented from making more money because of our higher state and local taxes. Wisconsin has few rich people of the Forbes 400 variety, and as you know from this blog, Wisconsin has trailed the national average in per-capita personal income growth since the late 1970s.

Here’s kind of a master-of-the-obvious graphic to go with this additional news:

The fact that Wisconsin currently has a Republican governor and Legislature does not make Wisconsin a red state. This is, remember, the state that has voted for Democrats for president since Michael Dukakis. Be that as it may, through Govs. Lee Dreyfus, Tony Earl, Tommy Thompson, Scott McCallum, James Doyle and Scott Walker, and through every possible combination of party control of the Legislature, Wisconsin was and is a tax hell. And the tax cuts Walker is about to sign into law won’t change that either.

You get what you vote for.