I get that many services you can obtain from other states doesn’t exist in Texas.
But still to fund the police, pave roads etc. can’t be cheap and can’t be all or even funded by feds.
Do they charge a high sales/corporate tax?
In: Economics
Texas has a franchise tax on businesses operating in Texas. It has a weird tax computation and I can’t find any source on how much Texas collects in franchise tax per year, but I prepared probably around 20-25 Texas franchise returns when I was working as a tax accountant and I saw a few companies pay well over 200 thousand.
Other people have mentioned property taxes but they’re not quite right, Texas does not impose a state level property tax, rather they allow the counties and cities in Texas to impose property taxes. Any revenue generated from those goes to the county or city not to the state of Texas. Though that just means that the state of Texas doesn’t have to provide those funds to counties/cities so it often amounts to the same thing.
Not sure where you get the idea there are no services here. I lived in CA before TX and CA’s tax rates are very high and the services are worse. Roads are better in TX than CA.
Anyway I think the sales tax is 8.5% or something like that which is not drastically higher than a lot of states. Property tax pays for other stuff. Incidentally the people telling you how high they are here, they have been lowered this past year but even before that it was not the highest in the country. I think either NJ or IL had that crown, can’t remember. Anyway houses here are cheaper and you get a 100K homestead exemption now along with the state lowering the effective rate. If you are rich and have a million dollar home your property taxes will be higher than a 200k home since 100k exemption doesn’t help rich folks as much. But a million dollar home here is getting into mansion territory depending on location.
All in all taxes are low here, services are good, and the state is growing incredibly fast (1 million people moved here in just the past 3 years and we have jobs for all of them and more lol). Those booming businesses are paying the sales tax too so the state has a surplus from tax receipts. As others mentioned every state has some kind of taxes even if there is no state income tax. But having lived around the country there are a group of states with overall lower rates, TX is one of those, most are in the middle, then the brutally high ones like CA, IL, NJ, HI and NY.
Toll roads! There were times when living in Houston that my monthly eztag bill was over $300 just commuting. That alone is almost as much as the income tax I pay in another state.
Property taxes in Texas are also bonkers. 3-4 times what I’m paying now.
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