Context is Everything

The Drudge Report has an interesting link with the headline

Vermont Top Tax: States Ranked by Total Taxes and Per Capita Amount…

Linking to the page gives a Census Bureau
table of total and per capita taxes by state, with no explanation, and
no outbound links to summaries or drill-down data.  When I saw
that my home state of Texas–with no state income tax– has an average
of $1434.16 per person, my immediate reaction was WTF??

A little bit of URL hacking got me to this page,
which explains it all:  sales tax, licenses, etc.  Of course,
it doesn’t explain the discrepancy in the two averages, $1315.19 vs.
$1434.16.