California and Minnesota don't have a lot in common, but they do share one distinction: The national Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council's "Business Tax Index 2014: Best to Worst State Tax Systems for Entrepreneurship and Small Business" reveals those are the only two states with tax systems worse than New Jersey's.

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The index pulls together 21 different tax measures and combines those into one tax score that allows the 50 states to be compared and ranked. Among the taxes included are income, capital gains, property, death or inheritance, unemployment, and state gas and diesel levies.

Ray Keating, SBE Council chief economist and the author of the report, said taxes matter at every level of government and 2014 was not a banner year for New Jersey, but the state should be used to that by this point.

"New Jersey is ranked 48th, and it's been in that spot for two years now," Keating said. "If you go back to our previous indexes, the state has always ranked poorly -- either 50th, 49th or 48th."

New Jersey actually ranks very high in several categories, but not enough to propel the state forward. A sampling of the tax rankings include: personal income (46th), individual capital gains (47th), interest rate (46th), corporate (T-43rd), property (49th), gas (2nd), diesel (5th), and state and local sales, gross receipts and excise (9th).

"States at the very bottom of our index, states like New Jersey, have so much to overcome," Keating said. "It's a monumental task, to say the least."

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