Orin Seybert - a state income tax is still money coming out of your paycheck every two weeks (or weekly or monthly depending on how yours is done) that will not come back to you until April. My bills come in monthly and I don't see any of my creditors agreeing to wait for a once-yearly payout for me to pay those bills. They're talking about a 4% tax right now. That's a couple hundred dollars a month.

So do I not buy heating oil or food? I could stop giving to my church because the state government is obviously so much more important than the work we do there. Right now, that couple of hundred dollars a month goes into the economy of Alaska in one form or another. Instead, now it will go to support a bloated bureaucracy that will have ZERO incentive to reduce further. 

Oh, and according to several tax prep sites I checked, if you make less than the level for itemization, you can't actually get your state income tax back through the federal system unless you itemize.