Obama lays out his budget. Budget fight to begin now.

[aerius]

Revenues are in the toilet right now because of the recession, but you'll notice the sharp plummet from 2001-02; that's the Bush tax cuts taking effect when the taxes were collected for FY 2002. Though I must confess to some curiosity as to how taxes as a share of GDP increased from FY 2002-07; did state taxes increase?

Probably a bunch of 9/11 stimulus & tax cut packages expiring. Another thing is the 2nd leg of the housing boom which started around then, property values started taking off so property tax collections went along for the ride.

[Zaune]

Shep: Consider that one of the reasons local taxes exist at all is that so much of the routine functions of government is done at the local level. It's the states, not the feds, that are responsible for enforcing traffic regulations, for a significant chunk of road upkeep, for making sure drivers are properly licensed and trained, even for doing shit like emissions inspections. Is it any wonder that to pay for all the stuff, stuff they have to do so that we can use our cars, they tax our cars?

Ditto, they're paying for the schoolteachers; is it any wonder they tax the community to pay for the schools? The county pays for police and fire departments; is it any wonder they tax the community to pay for those?

If you want to simplify the American tax structure, you could do it by folding the local governments into the federal government and folding the local tax collection into the IRS. Federal tax revenue as a share of GDP will go up accordingly, because the feds are now collecting the same property/vehicle/sales/whatever taxes the state used to collect. But hey, at least there won't be any damn bloodsucking state taxes.

Do you like that solution? Or were you just complaining about how many different organizations collect taxes in Virginia, without really wanting to solve the problem?

That's something I've been wondering about for quite a while. Is anyone in the US doing much in the way of deep thinking about whether or not it's still worth doing a lot of things at state level? Not just taxes but driving licenses, school curricula and so on.

[D.Turtle]

Exactly. Revenues are in the toilet right now because of the recession, but you'll notice the sharp plummet from 2001-02; that's the Bush tax cuts taking effect when the taxes were collected for FY 2002. Though I must confess to some curiosity as to how taxes as a share of GDP increased from FY 2002-07; did state taxes increase?

Yeah, it was mostly state revenue that increased, though federal revenue also recovered a bit:

Note the extreme drop in state revenue with the current crisis.

That's something I've been wondering about for quite a while. Is anyone in the US doing much in the way of deep thinking about whether or not it's still worth doing a lot of things at state level? Not just taxes but driving licenses, school curricula and so on.

I'd say that exactly the opposite is happening. Republicans, libertarians, Tea Party supporters, "moderate" Democrats, etc. are all convinced that the federal government does too much, has too much influence, and should be drastically reduced for increased independence of states. Hell, theres at least one state that is seriously pushing a nullification law in order to stop "unconstitutional" stuff from the federal level.

[Simon_Jester]

That's something I've been wondering about for quite a while. Is anyone in the US doing much in the way of deep thinking about whether or not it's still worth doing a lot of things at state level? Not just taxes but driving licenses, school curricula and so on.

As Turtle says, on the one hand you've got the anarcho-corporatists on the right, who will almost always prefer that government do nothing at all, or if it has to do something do it on the provincial level. And on the other, you've got the fact that our Constitution contains a provision reserving powers not expressly granted to the federal government to the states.

The powers of the federal government have been interpreted fairly broadly. But it's still quite possible for states to protest any given assumption of power by the federal government on Tenth Amendment grounds. As a result, the answer to your question is "no," because there's no one in the US who can decide whether a given thing should be done on the state level. The federal government lacks the authority to simply nationalize the school curriculum.* The states lack the authority to do so uniformly- even if one adopted a 'national' curriculum, the others wouldn't be bound by that.

*There's one common dodge used to get around this: conditional federal aid to the states. If you want federal highway funds you have to have thus-and-such policies on traffic and drunk driving regulations, if you want federal education funds you have to have thus-and-such policies on education, and so on.

[Jaevric]

What Simon_Jester said, plus the well-entrenched concept of "state's rights" and a lingering distrust of the national government, particularly in the south. There's a reason the Confederacy apologists trot out the "War of Northern Aggression" line and claim that the Civil War was fought over "state's rights," and because the northern-controlled federal government was bullying the poor disadvantaged Southern states.

I'd also imagine the Bible Belt would go ballistic at the idea of national education standards, because those standards might put the final nail in the coffin of teaching creationism/intelligent design in our schools, which is still an ongoing struggle at the state level here in Texas. Or those national education standards might not allow some of the historical revisionism that Texas is trying to put into our textbooks.

Finally, there's the "I've got mine, screw you!" factor in that a lot of Americans (and American states) don't want their money going to benefit someone else/some other state.

[Simon_Jester]

Ironically, this sentiment is often at its peak in states that are a net loss to the federal government- more federal benefits paid out than tax receipts paid in...

[LaCroix]

@Simon That's usually because they don't want their money to be spent elsewhere, the use every trick in the book to get as much of it back. OTOH, the states that are 'ok' with money distribution only take a fair share back.