What's New
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report
December 16, 2019
Corporate Tax Avoidance in the First Year of the Trump Tax Law
Profitable Fortune 500 companies avoided $73.9 billion in taxes under the first year of the Trump-GOP tax law. The study includes financial filings by 379 Fortune 500 companies that were profitable in 2018; it excludes companies that reported a loss.
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report
August 28, 2019
TCJA by the Numbers, 2020
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), signed into law by President Trump at the end of 2017, includes provisions that dramatically cut taxes and provisions that offset a fraction of the revenue loss by eliminating or limiting certain tax breaks. This page includes estimates of TCJA’s impacts in 2020.
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blog
January 24, 2020
GOP Legacy on IRS Administration: Auditing Mississippi, not Microsoft
Money doesn’t buy happiness—but it can buy immunity from the reach of Uncle Sam. The IRS is outgunned in cases against corporate giants because that’s how Republican leaders want it to be. They have systematically assaulted the agency’s enforcement capacity through decades of funding cuts. Instead of saving money, these cuts have cost billions: each dollar spent on the IRS results in several dollars of tax revenue collected.
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blog
January 22, 2020
State Rundown 1/22: “Only Light Can Do That”
This week as Americans celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s messages of resisting oppression and fighting for progress, state policymakers can look to some bright spots where tax and budget debates are bending toward justice. Among those highlights, Hawaii leaders are considering improvements to minimum wage policy, early childhood education, and affordable housing; Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly is seeking to reduce sales taxes applied to food and restore the state’s grocery tax credit; and advocates in Connecticut and Maryland are pushing for meaningful progressive tax reforms.
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blog
January 17, 2020
Why I've Joined the Fight for Tax Justice: Amy Hanauer
After years of watching tax policy increasingly leave communities behind, at ITEP I’ll have the chance to work with local, state and national partners on policy solutions. I’m prepared to push for a tax system that can better deliver economic, climate and racial justice; for a public sector that can prepare our kids and our grid for 2020 and beyond; and for an America that works for all of us, whether we were born in Nebraska or Hawaii, Detroit or Miami.
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blog
January 16, 2020
Hartford Business Journal: CT Voices proposes major state tax shift to reverse inequality
And creation of a new Child Tax Credit could provide poor and middle-income residents — even those earning nearly $500,000 per year — as much… -
blog
January 15, 2020
State Rundown 1/15: State Tax Proposals Are All Over the Map
State tax and budget debates have arrived in a big way, with proposals from every part of the country and everywhere on the spectrum from…
Who Pays? Sixth Edition
Poorest 20 percent pay a 50 percent higher effective state and local tax rate than the top 1 percent
ITEP’s sixth edition of Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax System in All 50 States finds that most state and local tax systems continue to tax low- and middle-income households at higher rates than the wealthy.
60 Profitable Fortune 500 Companies Avoided All Federal Income Taxes in 2018
For decades, profitable Fortune 500 companies have been able to manipulate the tax system to avoid paying even a dime in tax on billions of dollars in U.S. profits. This ITEP report provides the first comprehensive look at how the new corporate tax laws that took effect after the passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act affects the scale of corporate tax avoidance.
Understanding Major Federal Tax Credit Proposals
Federal lawmakers have announced at least five proposals to significantly expand existing tax credits or create new ones to benefit low- and moderate-income people. While these proposals vary a great deal and take different approaches, all would primarily benefit taxpayers in income groups who received only a small share of benefits from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The Case for Extending State-Level Child Tax Credits to Those Left Out: A 50-State Analysis
11.5 million children live in poverty across the country. Lawmakers can tackle poverty in their home states with refundable state-level Child Tax Credits and reach families the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act left behind. Joint report with the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy.
The Illusion of Race-Neutral Tax Policy
While ITEP has produced quantitative and qualitative research on class-based tax inequities, we, until recently, have ignored how tax policies affect communities based on race. Solely examining the tax law in the context of class misses a bigger-picture story about how the nation’s public policies not only perpetuate widening income and wealth inequality, they also preserve historic and current injustices that continue to allow white communities to build wealth while denying the same level of opportunity (and often suppressing it) to communities of color.
Impact
Whether it’s at the state or federal level, ITEP produces careful research and in-depth analyses of tax policies, and provides a voice for working people in tax policy debates. State advocates, policymakers and media often use our work to inform public discourse on current and proposed tax policies.
ITEP's Work in Action
Expertise
Federal Policy
ITEP’s federal policy resources provide quantitative and qualitative research and analysis on current tax policies, proposals, and reform options. Its distributional analyses highlight how tax proposals will affect low-income, middle-class and wealthy Americans nationally and in all 50 states.
Learn more about our Federal Policy work
State Policy
State taxes pay for essential public services, from education to health care. But the ideal design of a tax system is complicated. ITEP’s state policy resources offer insights into central issues, including the impact of state tax systems on individuals, families, and businesses. Its work also analyzes the sustainability of revenue sources over time.
Learn more about our State Policy work
Corporate Tax Research
ITEP’s corporate tax research examines the tax practices of Fortune 500 companies. Besides its corporate study on average effective tax rates paid by the nation’s largest, most profitable corporations, ITEP produces research on subjects such as offshore cash holdings, tax haven abuse, executive stock options and other tax loopholes.
Expert's View
There are plenty of obvious fixes: We can stop taxing money that goes mostly to the rich, like stock dividend and capital gains, at lower rates than we tax the earned income that most of us work for and live on. We can start taxing the wealth of multi-millionaires at least as much as we already tax the homes that are the main source of wealth for the middle class. And we can restore a reasonable estate tax on the many millions that get passed down from a great, great grandfather to an heir who lives off the inheritance. The smartest states are already moving to make their tax codes more progressive.
