Why do state taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes not figure into the amount of taxes the talking heads and commie scum say I pay? 
bit late, but imo- those taxes can't be applied broadly/consistently enough across the country (to the extent federal-only can) to be used in a fair argument. they require knowledge of too many state and local caveats, in addition to other factors, for the average american to look at your effective rate and understand your situation.
ex- someone could pay 20% effective on 50k in ohio and be denied access an abundance of free essential social services that the state has discarded so that they can "balance the budget". but in a theoretical state, someone could pay 30% effective rate on 50k (bearing in mind the wealthy tend to absorb the taxes/costs of what i'm about to write) and receive single-payer guaranteed health care, conditional college tuition reimbursement, and a number of other quality of life services provided by the state/local government.
so whose situation would you say is better- the person with the 20% tax rate, or the person with the 30% tax rate? if you just look at the numbers, obviously you say 20%, but if you look deeper, you might say that the person paying 30% was getting much more value out of their income. or- it might turn out that the cost of living in happyland is also substantially higher than in ohio, so at the end of the day the person with all the services provided to them can only afford pb&j for their family, and you're forced to choose the lesser of two evils.
really there's no easy way to compare one person's situation to another's unless all conditions are equal. and since there are so many complexities (the aforementioned taxes, cost of living adjustment, quality of services, efficiency, etc), i just go with the simplest denominator: federal-only.
also, i'm from texas, so what is state income tax
