North Carolina Justice Center: The Math Doesn’t Add Up
ITEP Work in ActionThe latest Senate tax plan continues to provide large tax cuts to the wealthiest taxpayers and profitable corporations, while shifting more of the overall tax load to middle-class families and reducing revenue for schools, health care and other services by nearly $1 billion each year when fully implemented.
While Senators say the new scheme addresses many of the criticisms of their earlier bill, the loss of revenue has remained high. To reduce the loss even slightly, the Senate plan would shift the tax load to the 80 percent of North Carolina taxpayers who earn up to $84,000 and who, on average, will see their taxes increase. This tax shift is inevitable when policymakers try to fund income tax cuts by expanding the sales tax to more goods and services, as the new Senate plan would do. An astonishing 56 percent of the Senate’s net tax cut going to in-state residents would go to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers.