State and local legislators in the 1990s face difficult choices concerning the appro-priate mix of state and local taxes. Essential to making informed decisions is an
understanding of the distributional effects of existing sources of tax revenues.
Unfortunately, in this regard the literature on the New View of property tax incidence
has overlooked the issue of the incidence of the property tax at the statewide level.
This study applies the New View tax incidence model to analyze the distributional
effects of the property tax in New Jersey. The results suggest that in a state with
property-tax rates above the national average—and with most of the tax base in
residential property—the statewide incidence of the property tax is proportional.
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