A new report suggests that these states could be creating financial problems down the road. The strategy of shifting from income taxes to consumption taxes has caused huge budget shortfalls in Kansas and, more recently, North Carolina, which announced a budget shortfall of nearly half a billion dollars.

One reason, according to the report from the Keystone Research Center and Good Jobs First, two left-leaning think tanks, is that just as the tax burden has shifted away from the wealthy, the wealthy have received a huge share of income growth in recent years.

While the bottom fifth of earners pay more than 10 percent of their income in state and local taxes, the top 1 percent pays closer to 5 percent, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates. Percentage of income is, of course, only one way to measure the tax burden — in sheer dollar terms, the wealthy pay far more than the poor. Still, the Keystone report’s authors, Greg LeRoy and Stephen Herzenberg, argue that a less regressive tax code is the answer to state budget woes, in what is basically a sophisticated pitch for a millionaire’s tax. “It’s time to have a clear debate about the impact of inequality on public finance,” Mr. LeRoy said.

Taxing the top fifth of earners at the same rate as the middle class would bring in $128 billion to state and local coffers, the report says. Taxing just the top 1 percent at the same rate as the middle class would bring in $68 billion, almost 10 times the amount needed to restore five years’ worth of cuts to higher education. The report also breaks it down state by state, saying that Texas and Florida, at the top of the list, would raise about $20 billion each if they taxed the top 20 percent at the middle-class rate, while North Carolina would raise about $2.2 billion and Kansas $1.3 billion.