The Tax Foundation has an interesting report out today doing just that. It focuses on the tax climate for businesses in particular but ends up being far broader; in fact, individual income and sales taxes account for more than half of the scoring system. The best state is Wyoming, the worst New Jersey.
Obligatory map:
The report should be quite valuable for state policymakers, even if they’re unenthusiastic about the Tax Foundation’s general goal of simple taxes with low rates and broad bases. (Some policy changes would improve a state’s ranking but lower its revenue — indeed, if a state doesn’t have a given type of tax at all, it gets a perfect 10/10 on that part of the score — and big-government types obviously will not find that to be a good tradeoff.) But the document is simply packed with interesting examples of how states vary in their tax policies, in ways good and bad.