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The tax angle is that Allysia Finley, the author of the Opinion article, concludes that there is a correlation between states with high state and local tax burdens and states with high levels of unhappiness, and a correlation between states with low state and local tax burdens and high levels of happiness. Her premise seems to be that people who pay relatively higher proportions of their income in taxes have less to spend on the things in life that make a person happy. There are three major flaws in her reasoning.
The first major flaw is that happiness flows from things that can be purchased. True, accumulation of material wealth and consumption ("vacations, hobbies, home improvements, eating out and child care," in Finley's words) can bring happiness. But there are many other things in life that bring happiness. One excellent example is the satisfaction that comes from helping others and pitching in, experiences that highlight the efforts of those engaged in volunteer work and community service. It may be that those who have not experienced the joy of giving mistake self-serving material acquisition and consumption as happiness. They don't know what they're missing.
The second major flaw is the assumption that correlation implies cause and effect. Finley acknowledges the danger of making that leap but notes that "but there's something going on here." My suggestion is that what contributes to unhappiness or lessens happiness is the frustration arising from watching politicians, namely legislators, executive branch officials, and even judges, fail to use taxes in ways that enhance quality of life for a wide swath of the population. Taxes are high in states that tend to have more need for public intervention. States are not equal in this respect. Consider several of the examples highlighted by Finley. She notes that unhappiness levels in California are high despite its presumably fine weather. Yet California's weather includes Santa Ana winds that fuel wildfires, mudslides triggered by the torrential rains that fall upon land left barren by those fires, earthquakes if I can be so bold as to include that phenomenon in the category of "weather," avalanches, snowstorms, droughts, and a wide variety of meteorological mishaps that belie the myth of California being a fair weather paradise. If those tribulations don't bring unhappiness, consider the position of California as a state that must absorb and deal with hundreds of thousands of immigrants, both legal and illegal, who arrive with almost nothing and put burdens on the state until such time, if at all, they become self-sufficient and contribute to the economic well-being of the state. The same challenge afflicts New York and New Jersey, two additional states to which Finley points in trying to persuade us that taxes cause unhappiness. A significant proportion of immigrants arriving on the East Coast end up in those two states. Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas don't face the sort of challenges faced by New York, New Jersey, California, and many of the other "high tax" states.
The third major flaw is that the correlation between high taxes and unhappiness advanced by Finley isn't borne out by the information available. Paul Caron's TaxProf post includes a chart that's worth examining. True, California, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey score high in unhappiness and in taxes. But how does one explain Indiana and Michigan, which also score near the top in unhappiness but are average in terms of tax burden? Could it be that insufficient tax revenues contribute to the factors that generate the unhappiness? Or consider West Virginia, a state with a tax burden exceeded by 44 other states, yet only 34th in happiness. On the other side, yes, Louisiana ranks first in happiness, and has the next-to-lowest tax burden, but what about Hawaii, coming in second in the happiness scores, and yet having a tax burden higher than 36 other states? Tax burdens in Florida and Arizona are average, and yet they claim third and fifth place, respectively, in the happiness sweepstakes.
It's not the tax rate or tax burden per se that contributes to unhappiness. If tax dollars were used properly for the improvement of quality of life, happiness would increase. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from studies, if those studies were to be undertaken, between levels of happiness among those contributing to charities that efficiently and properly use the contributions that they collect, and those who contribute to charities that misuse the funds that they raise. What's needed is some sort of corruption and inefficient government index that can be plotted against the tax rank and happiness score sequences.
Finley's premise suggests that if all taxes were repealed, happiness levels would approach infinity. I suggest the contrary. If all taxes were repealed, happiness levels would plummet to near zero. The flaw in the sort of analyses of which Finley's is one example, is that they plot data on a linear basis rather than a logarithmic or differential calculus basis. In other words, the relationship is best portrayed by U-shaped curves and not straight lines. Mathematics aside, perhaps imbuing the culture with a better sense of the meaning and worth of giving, in contrast to the greed of getting, would bring significant changes to the underlying information that Finley and others use in their anti-tax campaigns. Doing that would require a change in education processes and values. That's an issue that reaches far beyond taxes.
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