> Forbes List

That's problem number one right there. Forbes is pretty mediocre for cherry picking, and rarely accounts for things like reduced services, privatized costs etc.

Unless you're doing a cost of living comparison, a tax burden comparison is less informative than you might think. I'm not saying Maine's the best! (we're not) nor that we can't improve, but any argument that's just is about how Maine's taxes are terrible, you can pretty much just discount that argument. It's almost always based on biased or poorly calculated sources (you can't compare taxes in a dense, warm climate state to a rural poor state fairly). But even just going off taxes and nothing else, Maine's taxes are higher, but compared to other cold weather states on a relative scale, not so much.