Surprising.

1) Where does the money go? Relative to other states?

2) No homestead exemptions? $75k reduction would get you to ~$2250, which still isn't cheap, especially with that income tax.

>Sales tax ... 2 percentage points lower

What are the actual rates?

Max $700. "Your total household income must be $36,300 or less." Also,

"You were born before Jan. 1, 1965; OR You must have been totally and permanently disabled or blind during the entire year, regardless of your age; OR You must have had a dependent child living with you all of last year who was born before Jan. 1, 2020, and was under the age of 18 the entire year."

Lincoln county sales tax: 8.5%

Sparta, TN: 9.5%

Whoops. I may have been looking at the state tax rates vs. the total sales tax rates.

As for the first question, a hypothesis: KS is about twice the size of TN with about half the population; 14/km^2 vs 65/km^2. But for real numbers, I'm having a hard time finding comparables. And I'm having a hard time figuring out where TN's money comes from.

TN has roughly twice the budget of KS ($38.6B vs $18.4B) but spends less per capita ($5695 vs $6320) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets).

KS spends more of their budget on education; TN on Medicaid- (https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-of-st...).

In 2017, TN got 40% of its budget from the federales; KS, 25% (https://ballotpedia.org/Total_state_government_expenditures). TN gets roughly twice as much in total federal spending than KS (https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=5c7be0443698b7e8ae2...).