Pareto, taxes and job growth

From a Wall Street Journal editorial this interesting fact.

A new analysis by economist Art Laffer for the American Legislative Exchange Council finds that, from 2002 to 2012, 62% of the three million net new jobs in America were created in the nine states without an income tax, though these states account for only about 20% of the national population. The no-income tax states have had more stable revenue growth, while states like New York, New Jersey and California that depend on the top 1% of earners for nearly half of their income-tax revenue suffer wide and destabilizing swings in their tax collections.

Patterns surround us and often fall into very familiar forms, pareto distribution being one of them. This would appear to be one of those patterns - 20% of the population is generating 60% of the job growth. Sometimes patterns have significance and sometimes they are simply artifacts of randomness. In this case, the WSJ wants to see a pattern between states with no-income tax policies and job growth. Likely there is some sort of causal relationship between the two patterns but also likely it is much more complicated than that. Regardless of the wider implications, I find it interesting.