This is ridiculous and bogus. So many things wrong with it: 1. Self reported happiness varies greatly by culture; a society which reports low happiness may mer

This is ridiculous and bogus. So many things wrong with it: 1. Self reported happiness varies greatly by culture; a society which reports low happiness may merely be less enthused. So the basic data is completely untrustworthy. 2. Taking the top 5 and bottom 5 states is a ridiculous way to do a correlation. If there was a strong correlation, you could graph it all the way across all 50 states. And even if you found that correlation, it still wouldn't mean much, because... 3. Any correlation which treats Alaska (population: less than a million) and California (population: 54 million) as the same type of entity is ridiculous. Comparing cities might make slightly more sense, but comparing states is absurd. And even if you used cities, it would be silly because... 4. Controlling a study like this is nearly impossible. There's no reason to suspect taxation above any of the other thousands of alternative explanations, all of which make at least as much sense as taxation does. Which of course is what really happened here: someone who dislikes taxation is looking for evidence which might confirm that thought.