State's Tax Structure Called Good for Growing Business
The non-partisan Tax Foundation says Tennessee has the 10th-most business-friendly tax structure in the nation. The Tennessean reported the study today:

The study by the Tax Foundation is the first of its type by the 66-year-old Washington-based research organization to help businesses compare competitive state tax systems and provide state legislatures a way of measuring a state's attractiveness for new businesses, Scott Hodge, co-author of the study said. It was based on 2002 tax systems. States were listed based on a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the most business-friendly. Tennessee scored 7.04, compared with the national average of 5.97. The overall score is a composite of five indexes used to grade each tax system — the corporate tax index, the individual tax index, the sales and gross receipts tax index, the state fiscal balance index and a conformity index, which grades the complexity of the state's tax system compared with national standards.

You can read the Tax Foundation's study here (in a 28-page PDF file). The ten states with the most business-friendly tax systems are Wyoming, New Hampshire, Nevada, Colorado, Alaska, South Dakota, Florida,Washington, Oregon and Tennessee. The ten tax systems least hospitable to business are in Mississippi, California, Arkansas, Ohio, Nebraska, Hawaii, New York, Maine, Minnesota and Louisiana.

A few key points I found in a quick read of the study:

Generally speaking, states that rank highly manage without at least one of the major taxes. Indeed, Alaska scores well despite having the worst corporate tax system in the nation because it does not have either an individual income tax or a sales tax. Colorado has a "traditional" tax system that imposes a corporate income tax, an individual income tax, and a sales tax but ranks highly by keeping all of its taxes simple with low, flat rates.

Yes it does, with a Taxpayers Bill of Rights that requires a public vote on tax increases and forces government to return surplus revenue through tax cuts or direct rebates unless the public approves in a referendum a proposal to spend the surplus funds. You can read all about Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights here.

The Tennessean spent the last four years editorializing in favor of a state income tax, and slanting its news coverage in an effort to propel one through the state legislature, so it is not surprising that the story doesn't mention that eight of the top 10 states in the Tax Foundation's ranking - Wyoming, New Hampshire, Nevada, Alaska, South Dakota, Florida, Washington and Tennessee - do not have a state income tax. And Texas, the only other state without a state income tax, ranked 13th. Incidetally, three of the five states without a state sales tax are in the top 10 - Alaska, Oregon and New Hampshire.