Now that Wisconsin has eliminated collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions, it will be a useful test case for what effects those rights have. In the meantime, here’s another “piece of analysis”:http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/more-unionized-states-have-higher-taxes/ from Jason Sorens at “Pileus”:http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/, which follows on my “earlier”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/02/the_relationship_between_union.html “ones”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/02/more_on_unions_and_state_budge.html. He finds:
bq. What they show is that even when you control for overall state ideology (Democratic states have higher taxes, and really Democratic states have much higher taxes), union density increases tax rates. Increasing union density from 10% of the workforce, as in Nebraska, to 25%, as in Hawaii and New York, increases the tax burden by about one and a quarter percentage points of state personal income. For a sense of scale, the mean tax burden was 10.0% of personal income in 2008, and the standard deviation was 1.23, so this is essentially a standard deviation increase.
There’s more on the technical details at the analysis at the post.