So how have the states with those tax increases done?

By comparison, the US as a whole rose or was flat for most of this year.

Remember Illinois' big tax increase that went into effect at the beginning of the year? How has that been working out? The Illinois Policy Institute has a new report on what has happened.

Illinois started to create jobs as the national economy began to recover. But just when Illinois’s economy seemed to be turning around, lawmakers passed record tax increases in January of this year. Since then, Illinois’s employment numbers have done nothing but decline.

Data released today by the bureau confirms this downward trajectory. When it comes to putting people back to work, Illinois is going backwards. Since January, Illinois has dropped 89,000 people from its employment rolls. . . .

Just to remind people what happened in Illinois in January. The tax was retroactive to the beginning of the year.

In a deal hammered out by the state's Democratic leadership, the lame-duck legislature pushed through a 67% increase in the state income tax and a 45% increase in the corporate tax.

The new income-tax rate would add about $1,040 to the tax bill of a family of four earning $60,000 a year, and the new corporate rate would move the state into the top 10 among corporate taxers nationally.

Skeptics worried the increase has the potential of chasing both businesses and residents out of the state, and Democrats face the possibility of losing political support in 2012.

In some respects, the move wasn't a surprise: Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn defeated a weak Republican candidate in November after pledging repeatedly to raise taxes. And the state's fiscal crisis had become increasingly untenable after years of using short-term borrowing to close budget gaps and short-changing its pension liabilities.

"The state was careening toward bankruptcy, fiscal insolvency," said Mr. Quinn, who pledged to the sign the bill. "We're in a period now of reform and recovery." . . .

Look what happened in Maryland, when they imposed a "millionaire's" tax in that state:

in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state's millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up. . . .

Earlier this year even a liberal economist such as Laura D’Andrea Tyson wrote: "After the 1986 tax overhaul, the United States had one of the lowest corporate tax rates among the advanced industrial countries. Since then, these countries have been slashing their rates both to attract investment by American and other foreign companies and to discourage their own companies from shifting operations and profits to foreign locations offering even lower tax rates. . . . The United States needs a significantly lower tax rate on corporate income, not a higher one."



KPMG Corporate and Indirect Tax Rate Survey, 2008, published in “Growth and Competitiveness in the United States: The Role of Its Multinational Companies,” McKinsey Global Institute, June 2010.

Thanks much to Tony Troglio for the first link.